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" In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them. "

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" 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

Create

Artist

Work

" Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy. "

" Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic. "

" Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return. "

" A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us. "

W. H. Auden

Read

Real

" A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become. "

" The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age. "

" The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own. "

" No hero is mortal till he dies. "

W. H. Auden

Dies

Hero

" A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects. "

" Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods. "

" Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be. "

" God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich. "

" We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know. "

" Music is the best means we have of digesting time. "

" I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street. "

" My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain. "

W. H. Auden

Rain

Left

" To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why? "

" Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good. "

" It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ. "

" Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh. "

W. H. Auden

I Can

Love

" We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons. "

" You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at. "

W. H. Auden

You

Owe

" A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb. "

" Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate. "

" What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. "

" A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. "

" Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table. "

" No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible. "

" The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind. "