W. H. Auden citations
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Wystan Hugh Auden, plus connu sous la signature W. H. Auden est un poète, essayiste, dramaturge, librettiste et critique d'origine britannique, considéré comme l’un des plus importants et influents poètes du XXe siècle.

Il a vécu la première partie de sa vie au Royaume-Uni puis a émigré aux États-Unis en 1939 et est devenu citoyen américain en 1946. Il est élu Chancelier de l'Academy of American Poets en 1954, il occupera cette charge jusqu'en 1973. Wikipedia  

✵ 21. février 1907 – 29. septembre 1973   •   Autres noms W.H. Auden
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W. H. Auden: 122   citations 0   J'aime

W. H. Auden: Citations en anglais

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

W. H. Auden livre 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.”

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

“All pity is self-pity.”

W. H. Auden livre The Dyer's Hand

"Interlude: West's Disease", p. 243
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

“A real book reads us.”

Reported by Lionel Trilling in "On the Modern Element in Modern Literature", Partisan Review, January-February 1961, p. 15 (reprinted in Trilling's Beyond Culture, 1965): Trilling wrote: "taking the cue of W. H. Auden's remark that a real book reads us, I have been read by Eliot's poems...".
More commonly reported as "a real book is not one that we read but one that reads us". This paraphrase of Trilling's reported quotation first appeared in a review by Robie Macauley of Trilling's Beyond Culture in the New York Times Book Review, 14 November 1965, p. 38: "I must borrow a phrase from Mr. Trilling (who borrows it from W. H. Auden): a real book is not one that we read but one that reads us." The same version, attributed to Auden, appears in Evan Esar, 20,000 Quips & Quotes (1968), p. 87 (with a comma after "we read"). There is no evidence that Auden ever wrote or said this version of the phrase.
Other variations (e.g. "not one that's read" for "not one that we read") seem to be misrecollections of Robie Macaulay's paraphrase.
Reported quotations

“In the course of many centuries a few laborsaving devices have been introduced into the mental kitchen — alcohol, coffee, tobacco, Benzedrine, etc.”

W. H. Auden livre The Dyer's Hand

but these are very crude, constantly breaking down, and liable to injure the cook. Literary composition in the twentieth century A.D. is pretty much what it was in the twentieth century B.C.: nearly everything has still to be done by hand.
"Writing", p. 17
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

“And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets
Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss, O show us
History the operator, the
Organiser, Time the refreshing river."”

W. H. Auden livre Spain

<p> And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life
That shapes the individual belly and orders
The private nocturnal terror:
"Did you not found the city state of the sponge,<p>"Raise the vast military empires of the shark
And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton?
Intervene. Descend as a dove or
A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend."
Source: Spain (1937), Lines 33–44

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