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W. H. Auden
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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.“
„In any modern city, a great deal of our energy has to be expended in not seeing, not hearing, not smelling. An inhabitant of New York who possessed the sensory acuteness of an African Bushman would very soon go mad.“
„Now is the age of anxiety.“
„The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very different from the image which I try to create in the minds of others in order that they may love me.“
„When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,And when he cried the little children died in the streets.“
„Unfortunately for the modern dramatist, during the past century and a half the public realm has been less and less of a realm where human deeds are done, and more and more of a realm of mere human behavior. The contemporary dramatist has lost his natural subject.“
„Acts of injustice doneBetween the setting and the rising sunIn history lie like bones, each one.“
„The thin-lipped armorer,Hephaestos, hobbled away,Thetis of the shining breastsCried out in dismayAt what the god had wroughtTo please her son, the strongIron-hearted man-slaying AchillesWho would not live long.“
„All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: “I refuse to be what I am.”“
„Minus times minus equals plus,The reason for this we need not discuss.“
„A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.“
„Marriage is rarely blissBut, surely it would be worseAs particles to peltAt thousands of miles per secAbout a universeIn which a lover’s kissWould either not be feltOr break the loved one’s neck.“
„The poet who writes “free” verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor — dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.“
„The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.“
„One can only blaspheme if one believes.“
„At first critics classified authors as Ancients, that is to say, Greek and Latin authors, and Moderns, that is to say, every post-Classical Author. Then they classified them by eras, the Augustans, the Victorians, etc., and now they classify them by decades, the writers of the ’30’s, ’40’s, etc. Very soon, it seems, they will be labeling authors, like automobiles, by the year.“
„To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however “good” I may become, remains unchanged.“
„A god who is both self-sufficient and content to remain so could not interest us enough to raise the question of his existence.“
„Most people are even less original in their dreaming than in their waking life; their dreams are more monotonous than their thoughts and oddly enough, more literary.“
„Normally, when one passes someone on the street who is in pain, one either tries to help him, or one simply looks the other way. With a photo there’s no human decision; you’re not there; you can’t turn away; you simply gape. It’s a form of voyeurism.“
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