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Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

W. H. Auden

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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
Author
Composer
Essayist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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Breaking
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Dead
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Artist
Art

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What living occasion can, Be just to the absent?
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It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.
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You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire.
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The nightingales are sobbing in The orchards of our mothers, And hearts that we broke long ago Have long been breaking others Tears are round, the sea is deep: Roll them overboard and sleep.
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Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.
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It's usually the stupid people that develop long illnesses. You need more than indolence and selfishness, you need endurance to make a good patient.
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The Ogre does what ogres can, Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach, The Ogre cannot master Speech: About a subjugated plain, Among its desperate and slain, The Ogre stalks with hands on hips, While drivel gushes from his lips.
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Whatever you do, good or bad, people will always have something negative to say
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Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.
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Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.
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It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful.
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Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.
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We must love one another or die
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One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
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When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.
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And none will hear the postman’s knock Without a quickening of the heart. For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
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The camera may do justice to laughter, but must degrade sorrow.
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Life is a picnic on a precipice.
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In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
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To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself.
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