H. Auden
H. Auden
mad acting actors
Human beings are, necessarily, actors who...can be divided...into the sane who know they are acting and the mad who do not.
remember forget has-beens
Though one cannot always Remember exactly why one has been happy, There is no forgetting that one was.
art should-have law
As biological organisms made of matter, we are subject to the laws of physics and biology: as conscious persons who create our own history we are free to decide what that history shall be. Without science, we should have no notion of equality; without art, no notion of liberty.
grief passion men
Most poetry is the utterance of a man in some state of passion, love, joy, grief, rage, etc., and no doubt this is as it should be. But no man is perpetually in a passion and those states in which he is amused and amusing, detached and irreverent, if less important, are no less amusing. If there were no poets who, like Byron, express these states, Poetry would lack something.
sorrow gold mountain
There was still gold and silver in the mountains, And hunger was a more immediate sorrow
sadness envy no-love
There is no love; There are only the various envies, all of them sad.
guilt wealth drink
A poor American feels guilty at being poor, but less guilty than an American rentier who has inherited wealth but is doing nothingto increase it; what can the latter do but take to drink and psychoanalysis?
children animal faces
The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.
grieving fog world
Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.
food cooking murder
Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.
civilization greek conscious
Had Greek civilization never existed ... we would never have become fully conscious.
writing proud fame
Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
character self two
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
writing men dragons
A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.