I had now been in the United States of America something like five years, working here and there as the inclination seized me, which, I must confess, was not often. I was certainly getting some enjoyment out of life, but now and then the waste of time appalled me, for I still have a conviction that I was born to a different life.


W. H. Davies

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I like to see a good scientific bout by men who know the use of their hands but would rather walk tw...
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Mother's father and brothers all took great interest in pugilism, and they knew the game well fr...
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But cats to me are strange, so strange I cannot sleep if one is near.
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Teetotallers lack the sympathy and generosity of men that drink.
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How the snow falls in the north! Flake on flake falling incessantly, until the small dingles are alm...
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Being in this fine mood, I spoke to a little boy, whom I saw playing alone in the road, asking him w...
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What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?
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I like to give pennies to children, but unfortunately, a man cannot do these things if he lives in a...
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As long as I love Beauty I am young.
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The more help a person has in his garden, the less it belongs to him.
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My own wandering blood comes from my seafaring grandfather, who, after he had left the sea and settl...
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We were determined to be in the fashion, and to visit the various delightful watering places on Long...
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I don't suppose there is a more daring or more impudent rascal on earth than a good American beg...
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It is not altogether shyness that now makes me unsuccessful in company. Sometimes it is a state of m...
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What's all this fuss about fathers being present at the birth of their children? The way events are ...
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The more the soul knows, the more she loves, and loving much, she tastes much.
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All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred.
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Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
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All that we are not stares back at what we are.
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A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a ...
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To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
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You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.
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In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him ...
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'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature...
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Art is born of humiliation.
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Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.
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In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.
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Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
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What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed li...
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If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.
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The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the othe...
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Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I ...
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In those whom I like, I can find no common denominator; in those whom I love I can: they all make me...
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Continuing a short series on forgiveness: Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner. ("To know all i...
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All theological language is necessarily analogical, but it was singularly unfortunate that the Churc...
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Commemoration of Cecile Isherwood, Founder of the Community of the Resurrection, Grahamstown, South ...
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All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
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Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
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Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
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We are here on earth to do good to others. What the others are here for, I don't know.
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Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and...
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Eagerly, musician,Sweep your string,So we may sing,Elated, optative,Our several voicesInterblending,...
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The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
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Be true to the best you know. This is your high ideal. If you do your best, you cannot do more.
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You have to see the sex act comically, as a child.
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You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a s...
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When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mist...
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Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinkin...
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Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life ...
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A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
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Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
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To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrat...
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Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
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We must love one another or die.
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A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.
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The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
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Left to itself the masculine imagination has very little appreciation for the here and now; it prefe...
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How happy the lot of the mathematician! He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so hig...
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I and the public know
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Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
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No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
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If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willful...
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The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when ...
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Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of...
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Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their trivial...
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Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so con...
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One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
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And none will hear the postman's knock
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All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular c...
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Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
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May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, consideri...
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My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
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Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would cal...
W. H. AUDEN
Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, ...
W. H. AUDEN
The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet dev...
W. H. AUDEN
Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do; it like some hidden assassin waiting to...
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Cancer is a curious thing...
Nobody knows what the cause is,
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I...
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I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a suspension of belief. A poet must never make ...
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It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his...
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Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.
W. H. AUDEN
Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their aff...
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As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language against corruption....
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You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire.
W. H. AUDEN
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a m...
W. H. AUDEN
A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good ...
W. H. AUDEN
But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided.
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If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all ...
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Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they s...
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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 ...
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The Americans are violently oral. That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father h...
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God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
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The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in ...
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The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most pa...
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Criticism should be a casual conversation.
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Now is the age of anxiety.
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A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
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It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one's nose, a good deal of it to know in whi...
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Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Pa...
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One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
W. H. AUDEN
A poet's hope: to be,
like some valley cheese,
local, but prized elsewhere.
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All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
W. H. AUDEN
I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the m...
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We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.
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We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.
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A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
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The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as...
W. H. AUDEN
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology ...
W. H. AUDEN
When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into ...
W. H. AUDEN
Know how sublime a thing is to suffer and be strong.
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You would attain to the divine perfection....
H. W. LONGFELLOW
Something attempted, something done, Has earned a nights repose.
H. W. LONGFELLOW
The worst bankruptcy in the world is the person who has lost his enthusiasm.
H. W. ARNOLD
He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, ...
W. H. AUDEN
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Pa...
W. H. AUDEN
To save your world you asked this man to die;
Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
W. H. AUDEN
No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
W. H. AUDEN
False enchantment can last a lifetime.
W. H. AUDEN
Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table.
W. H. AUDEN
We are none of us infallible--not even the youngest of us.
W. H. THOMPSON
When the Sex War ended with the slaughter of the Grandmothers, / They found a bachelor's baby suffoc...
W. H. AUDEN
Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores
W. H. AUDEN
'Healing,'' Papa would tell me, ''is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'
W. H. AUDEN
Embrace me, belly, like a bride.
W. H. AUDEN
Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession
W. H. AUDEN
O for doors to be open and an invite with gilded edges / To dine with Lord Lobcock and Count Asthma.
W. H. AUDEN
I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-Second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of ...
W. H. AUDEN
It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction ...
W. H. AUDEN
The nightingales are sobbing in / The orchards of our mothers, / And hearts that we broke long ago /...
W. H. AUDEN
The image of myself which I try to create in my own mind in order that I may love myself is very dif...
W. H. AUDEN
If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
W. H. AUDEN
If there are any of you at the back who do not hear me, please don't raise your hands because I am a...
W. H. AUDEN
Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy.
W. H. AUDEN
Look, stranger, at this island now / The leaping light for your delight discovers.
W. H. AUDEN
Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their conscience...
W. H. AUDEN
Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in ...
W. H. AUDEN
Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good
W. H. AUDEN
lay your faithless head upon my arm
W. H. AUDEN
Commemoration of John Wycliffe, Reformer, 1384 [John] Wycliffe's doctrine of "dominion founded i...
W. H. SUMMERS
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen
W. H. AUDEN
I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain ...
W. H. AUDEN
Hunger allows no choice, To the citizens or the police; We must love one another or die
W. H. AUDEN
Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator; but among those whom I love, I ...
W. H. AUDEN
Five minutes on even the nicest mountain / Is awfully long.
W. H. AUDEN
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar, and is shocked by the unexpected: the eye, on the oth...
W. H. AUDEN
'In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away,And Time will have his fancy To-morrow or to-day.
W. H. AUDEN
Sob, heavy world Sob as you spin, Mantled in mist Remote from the happy
W. H. AUDEN
A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scien...
W. H. AUDEN