Quote

Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too personal style.

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
Style
Slavery
Obey
Suffering
Master
Choosing
Fact
Slave
Delusion
Deluding
Facts
Writers
Hardly
Enslaved
Thinking
Masters
Escape
Intolerable
Habit
Command
Commands
Conditions
Condition
Obliged
Personal
Suffer
Slaves

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I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade
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Civilizations should be measured by the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained.
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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 theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.
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Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss
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Words have no word for words that are not true.
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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.
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Man is a history-making creature, who can neither repeat his past, nor leave it behind.
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Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.
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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.
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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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Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
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A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
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When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
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Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.
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In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
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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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There are three cardinal rules - don't take somebody else's boyfriend unless you've been specifically invited to do so, don't take a drink without being asked, and keep a scrupulous accounting in financial matters.
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O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time.
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Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.
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