Quote

I know nothing, except what everyone knows - if there when Grace dances, I should dance.

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
Everyone
Nothing
Dances
Dancing
Dance
Except
Grace

More quotes by W. H. Auden

Image
All pity is self-pity.
W. H. Auden
Image
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.
W. H. Auden
Image
A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.
W. H. Auden
Image
Swans in the winter air A white perfection have
W. H. Auden
Image
Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.
W. H. Auden
Image
Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character it is just as credible that a stupid person should sing beautifully as that a clever person should do so.
W. H. Auden
Image
So long as we think of it objectively, time is Fate or Chance, the factor in our lives for which we are not responsible, and about which we can do nothing but when we begin to think of it subjectively, we feel responsible for our time, and the notion of punctuality arises.
W. H. Auden
Image
To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who's untrue to his wife.
W. H. Auden
Image
All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.
W. H. Auden
Image
O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you've missed.
W. H. Auden
Image
Money cannot buy the fuel of love but is excellent kindling.
W. H. Auden
Image
If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.
W. H. Auden
Image
Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon world affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit A social science.
W. H. Auden
Image
The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is.
W. H. Auden
Image
Some books are undeservedly forgotten none are undeservedly remembered.
W. H. Auden
Image
The poet who writes free verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.
W. H. Auden
Image
Human beings are, necessarily, actors who...can be divided...into the sane who know they are acting and the mad who do not.
W. H. Auden
Image
What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?
W. H. Auden
Image
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
Image
Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes: Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.
W. H. Auden