Quote

You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.

W. H. Auden

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Quite
Secret
Two
America
Different
Shared
Think
Secrets
Thinking
Relation
People
England

More quotes by W. H. Auden

Image
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences and ask themselves with how many people and on how many occasions they have genuinely and profoundly shared some experience with another...
W. H. Auden
Image
If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
W. H. Auden
Image
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.
W. H. Auden
Image
Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral
W. H. Auden
Image
As a rule, it was the pleasure-haters who became unjust.
W. H. Auden
Image
The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.
W. H. Auden
Image
In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.
W. H. Auden
Image
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
W. H. Auden
Image
There is no love There are only the various envies, all of them sad.
W. H. Auden
Image
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.
W. H. Auden
Image
You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.
W. H. Auden
Image
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
W. H. Auden
Image
Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear what-is-not is the profundity of what-is.
W. H. Auden
Image
Nobody is ever sent to Hell: he or she insists on going there.
W. H. Auden
Image
All pity is self-pity.
W. H. Auden
Image
Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
W. H. Auden
Image
Courses in prosody, rhetoric and comparative philology would be required of all students, and every student would have to select three courses out of courses in mathematics, natural history, geology, meteorology, archaeology, mythology, liturgics, cooking.
W. H. Auden
Image
The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.
W. H. Auden
Image
Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return.
W. H. Auden
Image
In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
W. H. Auden