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Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
W. H. Auden
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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Thunder
Distant
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Picnics
More quotes by W. H. Auden
A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.
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For time is inches And the heart's changes, Where ghost has haunted Lost and wanted.
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Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
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We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.
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If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.
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What living occasion can, Be just to the absent?
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Acts of injustice done Between the setting and the rising sun In history lie like bones, each one.
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You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.
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Swans in the winter air A white perfection have
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With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse
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Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.
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We till shadowed days are done, We must weep and sing Duty's conscious wrong, The Devil in the clock
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To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.
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Few can remember clearly when innocence came to a sudden end, the moment at which we ask for the first time: Am I loved?
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The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
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We were put on this Earth to help others. Why others were put here is beyond me.
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The definition of prayer is paying careful and concentrated attention to something other than your own constructions.
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Art is born of humiliation.
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Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to come from myself, from such display of intelligence, wit and malice as I can contrive. One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
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Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.
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