H. Auden
H. Auden
laughter justice sorrow
The camera may do justice to laughter, but must degrade sorrow.
language metaphorical humans
Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.
love relationship running
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
our-world body claims
Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe.
thinking personal-knowledge guessing
The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist.
hate bed get-up
Those who hate to go to bed fear death; those who hate to get up fear life.
heart tears may
God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.
horse gun wicked
If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
thinking firsts study
There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that , as a rule, a poet should read them.
motorcycle tables artifacts
A poem is a verbal artifact which must be as skillfully and solidly constructed as a table or a motorcycle.
worry fancy today
In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy To-morrow or today.
picnics life-is precipice
Life is a picnic on a precipice.
angle
The older lives like not to be stood in rows or at right angles.
lying littles noses
It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.