Quotation:
"Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate."
More quotes from: W. H. Auden
- "A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, ..."
- "A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects. "
- "A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. "
- "A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep. "
- "A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us. "
- "A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. ..."
- "A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it ..."
- "All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation. "
- "Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual ..."
- "America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, ..."
- "Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among ..."
- "Art is born of humiliation. "
- "Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead. "
- "Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences ..."
- "Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality. "
- "Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to ..."
- "Composing mortals with immortal fire. "
- "Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic. "
- "Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own ..."
- "Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud. "
- "For who can bear to feel himself forgotten? "
- "Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as ..."
- "God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich. "
- "Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say: Sanctity is the state ..."
- "I don't get acting jobs because of my looks. "
- "I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river ..."
- "If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons ..."
- "In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of ..."
- "In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be ..."
- "It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, ..."
- "It is... axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than ..."
- "It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to ..."
- "It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money ..."
- "It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too ..."
- "Learn from your dreams what you lack. "
- "May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God ..."
- "Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession. "
- "Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has ..."
- "Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell. "
- "Music is the best means we have of digesting time. "
- "My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain. "
- "No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are ..."
- "No good opera plot can be sensible:... people do not sing when they are feeling ..."
- "No hero is mortal till he dies. "
- "No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called ..."
- "Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do; it like some hidden ..."
- "Now is the age of anxiety. "
- "One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell. "
- "Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out ..."
- "Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into ..."
- "Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered. "
- "Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they ..."
- "The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind. "
- "The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, ..."
- "The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have ..."
- "The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; ..."
- "The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living. "
- "There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, ..."
- "To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he ..."
- "To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life, the ..."
- "We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons. "
- "We are here on Earth to do good to others. What the others are here ..."
- "What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to ..."
- "When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who ..."
- "When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate ..."
- "You have to see the sex act comically, as a child. "
- "You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people ..."
- "You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference ..."
- "You owe it to us all to get on with what you're good at. "
- "Your cameraman might enjoy himself because my face looks like a wedding-cake left out in ..."


