W. H. Auden: Trending quotes

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W. H. Auden: 244 quotes28 likes

“Acts of injustice done
Between the setting and the rising sun
In history lie like bones, each one.”

W. H. Auden The Ascent of F6

The Ascent of F6, written with Christopher Isherwood, Act II, Scene V; quoted by Richard Adams in his novel Watership Down. (1936)

“Let us honour if we can
The vertical man
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.”

W. H. Auden book Poems

Dedication to Christopher Isherwood, Poems (1930)

“Music is the best means we have of digesting time.”

W. H. Auden

A quotation from Igor Stravinsky, not Auden. Cited as Auden's through a misreading of a paragraph in Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship, by Robert Craft (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p. 6. (The antecedent of "he" is unmistakably "Mr. S." in Craft's sentence: "He also makes a marvelous remark to the effect that 'Music is the best means we have of digesting time'"; and in the sentence that follows "he" is again Stravinsky, not Auden.)
Misattributed

“Sad is Eros, builder of cities,
And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.”

W. H. Auden

In Memory of Sigmund Freud (1939), lines 111–112

“All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: "I refuse to be what I am."”

W. H. Auden book The Dyer's Hand

"Interlude: West's Disease", p. 241
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

“All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.”

W. H. Auden September 1, 1939

Source: September 1, 1939 (1939), Lines 78–88; for a 1955 anthology text the poet changed this line to "We must love one another and die" to avoid what he regarded as a falsehood in the original.

“Minus times minus equals plus,
The reason for this we need not discuss.”

W. H. Auden

As stated in &quot;The Poet Himself&quot; http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01E6D81539F937A35753C1A967948260 by Paul Fussell, in The New York Times (4 October 1981), these lines were a &quot;math mnemonic&quot; which Auden &quot;had to memorize as a child.&quot; <br class="br">Misattributed

“The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish.”

W. H. Auden September 1, 1939

Source: September 1, 1939 (1939), Lines 56–58