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" No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive, and quite a number fondly believe their wish has been granted. "

W. H. Auden

Wishes

Wish

Lived

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" All that we are not stares back at what we are. "

W. H. Auden

Back

" Learn from your dreams what you lack. "

" One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell. "

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

" Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest. "

" In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag. "

W. H. Auden

Times

Joy

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

" Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to do. "

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

" If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.' "

" Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one. "

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

" A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do. "

" For who can bear to feel himself forgotten? "

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

" 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

" Thousands have lived without love, not one without water. "

" Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel. "

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

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

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