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Warm Are The Still And Lucky Miles, White Shores Of Longing Stretch Away, A Light Of Recognition Fills The Whole Great Day, And Bright The Tiny World Of Lovers' Arms. Silence Invades The Breathing Wood Where Drowsy Limbs A Treasure Keep, Now Greenly Falls The Learned Shade Across The Sleeping Brows And Stirs Their Secret To A Smile. Restored! Returned! The Lost Are Borne On Seas Of Shipwreck Home At Last: See! In A Fire Of Praising Burns The Dry Dumb Past, And We Our Life-day Long Shall Part No More.

-W. H. Auden

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Warm Are The Still

W. H. Auden

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Warm Are The Still And Lucky Miles, White Shores Of Longing Stretch Away, A Light Of Recognition Fills The Whole Great Day, And Bright The Tiny World Of Lovers' Arms. Silence Invades The Breathing Wood Where Drowsy Limbs A Treasure Keep, Now Greenly Falls The Learned Shade Across The Sleeping Brows And Stirs Their Secret To A Smile. Restored! Returned! The Lost Are Borne On Seas Of Shipwreck Home At Last: See! In A Fire Of Praising Burns The Dry Dumb Past, And We Our Life-day Long Shall Part No More.

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Though One Cannot Always Remember Exactly Why One Has Been Happy, There Is No Forgetting That One Was.

I Sit In One Of The Dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain And Afraid As The Clever Hopes Expire Of A Low Dishonest Decade

Whatever The Field Under Discussion, Those Who Engage In Debate Must Not Only Believe In Each Other's Good Faith, But Also In Their Capacity To Arrive At The Truth.

To The Man-in-the-street, Who, I'm Sorry To Say, Is A Keen Observer Of Life. The Word Intellectual Suggests Straight Away. A Man Who's Untrue To His Wife.

If Equal Affection Cannot Be, Let The More Loving Be Me.

Defenceless Under The Night Our World In Stupor Lies; Yet, Dotted Everywhere, Ironic Points Of Light Flash Out Wherever The Just Exchange Their Messages: May I, Composed Like Them Of Eros And Of Dust, Beleaguered By The Same Negation And Despair, Show An Affirming Flame.

As I Walked Out One Evening, Walking Down Bristol Street, The Crowds Upon The Pavement Were Fields Of Harvest Wheat. And Down By The Brimming River I Heard A Lover Sing Under An Arch Of The Railway: 'love Has No Ending. 'i'll Love You, Dear, I'll Love You Till China And Africa Meet, And The River Jumps Over The Mountain And The Salmon Sing In The Street, 'i'll Love You Till The Ocean Is Folded And Hung Up To Dry And The Seven Stars Go Squawking Like Geese About The Sky.

I'm Always Amazed At The American Practice Of Allowing One Party To A Homosexual Act To Remain Passive--it's So Undemocratic. Sexmust Be Mutual.

All Pity Is Self-pity.

Cathedrals, Luxury Liners Laden With Souls, Holding To The East Their Hulls Of Stone.

If It Really Was Queen Elizabeth Who Demanded To See Falstaff In A Comedy, Then She Showed Herself A Very Perceptive Critic. But Even In The Merry Wives Of Windsor, Falstaff Has Not And Could Not Have Found His True Home Because Shakespeare Was Only A Poet. For That He Was To Wait Nearly Two Hundred Years Till Verdi Wrote His Last Opera. Falstaff Is Not The Only Case Of A Character Whose True Home Is The World Of Music; Others Are Tristan, Isolde And Don Giovanni.

To Me Art's Subject Is The Human Clay, / And Landscape But A Background To A Torso; / All Cezanne's Apples I Would Give Away / For One Small Goya Or A Daumier.

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...

Politics Cannot Be A Science, Because In Politics Theory And Practice Cannot Be Separated, And The Sciences Depend Upon Their Separation.

Those Who Will Not Reason, Perish In The Act. Those Who Will Not Act, Perish For That Reason.

A Shilling Life Will Give You All The Facts.

The Commonest Ivory Tower Is That Of The Average Man, The State Of Passivity Towards Experience.

The Nightingales Are Sobbing In The Orchards Of Our Mothers, And Hearts That We Broke Long Ago Have Long Been Breaking Others; Tears Are Round, The Sea Is Deep: Roll Them Overboard And Sleep.

Some Writers Confuse Authenticity, Which They Ought Always To Aim At, With Originality, Which They Should Never Bother About.

Funny Basketball

The Ideal Audience The Poet Imagines Consists Of The Beautiful Who Go To Bed With Him, The Powerful Who Invite Him To Dinner And Tell Him Secrets Of State, And His Fellow-poets. The Actual Audience He Gets Consists Of Myopic Schoolteachers, Pimply Young Men Who Eat In Cafeterias, And His Fellow-poets. This Means, In Fact, He Writes For His Fellow-poets.

Dance, Dance, Dance Till You Drop.

The Habit-forming Pain, Mismanagement And Grief: We Must Suffer Them All Again.

Nobody Is Ever Sent To Hell: He Or She Insists On Going There.

Rhymes, Meters, Stanza Forms, Etc., Are Like Servants. If The Master Is Fair Enough To Win Their Affection And Firm Enough To Command Their Respect, The Result Is An Orderly Happy Household. If He Is Too Tyrannical, They Give Notice; If He Lacks Authority, They Become Slovenly, Impertinent, Drunk And Dishonest.

'healing,' Papa Would Tell Me, 'is Not A Science, But The Intuitive Art Of Wooing Nature.'

Does God Judge Us By Appearances? I Suspect That He Does.

Let Us Honor If We Can The Vertical Man, Though We Value None But The Horizontal One

What The Mass Media Offers Is Not Popular Art, But Entertainment Which Is Intended To Be Consumed Like Food, Forgotten, And Replaced By A New Dish.

A Poet Feels The Impulse To Create A Work Of Art When The Passive Awe Provoked By An Event Is Transformed Into A Desire To Express That Awe In A Rite Of Worship.

All Works Of Art Are Commissioned In The Sense That No Artist Can Create One By A Simple Act Of Will But Must Wait Until What He Believes To Be A Good Idea For A Work Comes To Him.

Dogmatic Theological Statements Are Neither Logical Propositions Nor Poetic Utterances. They Are ''shaggy Dog'' Stories; They Have A Point, But He Who Tries Too Hard To Get It Will Miss It.

In Addition To English, At Least One Ancient Language, Probably Greek Or Hebrew, And Two Modern Languages Would Be Required.

In Headaches And In Worry Vaguely Life Leaks Away, And Time Will Have His Fancy To-morrow Or Today.

If We Apply The Term Revolution To What Happened In North America Between 1776 And 1829, It Has A Special Meaning. Normally, The Word Describes The Process By Which Man Transforms Himself From One Kind Of Man, Living In One Kind Of Society, With One Way Of Looking At The World, Into Another Kind Of Man, Another Society, Another Conception Of Life.... The American Case Is Different: It Is Not A Question Of The Old Man Transforming Himself Into The New, But Of The New Man Becoming Alive To The Fact That He Is New, That He Has Been Transformed Already Without His Having Realized It.

To Make One, There Must Be Two.

In The Deserts Of The Heart Let The Healing Fountain Start.

To Pray Is To Pay Attention To Something Or Someone Other Than Oneself. Whenever A Man So Concentrates His Attention - On A Landscape, A Poem, A Geometrical Problem, An Idol, Or The True God - That He Completely Forgets His Own Ego And Desires, He Is Praying. The Primary Task Of The Schoolteacher Is To Teach Children, In A Secular Context, The Technique Of Prayer.

Perhaps There Is Only One Cardinal Sin: Impatience. Because Of Impatience We Were Driven Out Of Paradise, Because Of Impatience We Cannot Return.

The Way To Read A Fairy Tale Is To Throw Yourself In.

About Suffering They Were Never Wrong, The Old Masters.

One Of The Troubles Of Our Times Is That We Are All, I Think, Precocious As Personalities And Backward As Characters.

Far From His Illness The Wolves Ran On Through The Evergreen Forests, The Peasant River Was Untempted By The Fashionable Quays; By Mourning Tongues The Death Of The Poet Was Kept From His Poems.

To Hunt For Symbols In A Fairy Tale Is Absolutely Fatal.

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.

There Has Been A Vast Output Of Critical Studies In Contemporary Poetry, Some Of Them First Rate, But I Do Not Think That , As A Rule, A Poet Should Read Them.

In The Eyes Of Others A Man Is A Poet If He Has Written One Good Poem. In His Own He Is Only A Poet At The Moment When He Is Making His Last Revision To A New Poem. The Moment Before, He Was Still Only A Potential Poet; The Moment After, He Is A Man Who Has Ceased To Write Poetry, Perhaps Forever.

Criticism Should Be A Casual Conversation.

The Definition Of Prayer Is Paying Careful And Concentrated Attention To Something Other Than Your Own Constructions.

The Primary Function Of Poetry, As Of All The Arts, Is To Make Us More Aware Of Ourselves And The World Around Us. I Do Not Know If Such Increased Awareness Makes Us More Moral Or More Efficient. I Hope Not. I Think It Makes Us More Human, And I Am Quite Certain It Makes Us More Difficult To Deceive.

Long Ago The Accusations Had Begun, And Suddenly Knew By Whom It Had Been Judged

A Poet Can Write About A Man Slaying A Dragon, But Not About A Man Pushing A Button That Releases A Bomb.

Of Course,behaviourism 'works'. So Does Torture.

Literary Confessors Are Contemptible, Like Beggars Who Exhibit Their Sores For Money, But Not So Contemptible As The Public That Buys Their Books.

But Once In A While The Odd Thing Happens Once In A While The Dream Comes True And The Whole Pattern Of Life Is Altered Once In A While, The Moon Turns Blue

From Beginning To End Wilde Performed His Life And Continued To Do So Even After Fame Had Taken The Plot Out Of His Own Hands.

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.

The Poet Marries The Language, And Out Of This Marriage The Poem Is Born.

It Is, For Example, Axiomatic That We Should All Think Of Ourselves As Being More Sensitive Than Other People Because, When We Are Insensitive In Our Dealings With Others, We Cannot Be Aware Of It At The Time: Conscious Insensitivity Is A Self-contradiction.

Follow, Poet, Follow Right To The Bottom Of The Night, With Your Unconstraining Voice Still Persuade Us To Rejoice; With The Farming Of A Verse Make A Vineyard Of The Curse, Sing Of Human Unsuccess In A Rapture Of Distress; In The Deserts Of The Heart Let The Healing Fountain Start, In The Prison Of His Days Teach The Free Man How To Praise.

The Only Way To Spend New Year's Eve Is Either Quietly With Friends Or In A Brothel. Otherwise When The Evening Ends And People Pair Off, Someone Is Bound To Be Left In Tears.

We Are All Here On Earth To Help Others; What On Earth The Others Are Here For I Don't Know.

To Be Free Is Often To Be Lonely.

For Time Is Inches And The Heart's Changes, Where Ghost Has Haunted Lost And Wanted.

Like Everything Which Is Not The Involuntary Result Of Fleeting Emotion But The Creation Of Time And Will, Any Marriage, Happy Or Unhappy, Is Infinitely More Interesting Than Any Romance, However Passionate.

Herds Of Reindeer Move Across Miles And Miles Of Golden Moss

Health Is The State About Which Medicine Has Nothing To Say.

Few Can Remember Clearly When Innocence Came To A Sudden End, The Moment At Which We Ask For The First Time: Am I Loved?

A Small Grove Massacred To The Last Ash, An Oak With Heart-rot, Give Away The Show: This Great Society Is Going To Smash; They Cannot Fool Us With How Fast They Go, How Much They Cost Each Other And The Gods. A Culture Is No Better Than Its Woods.

You Must Go To Bed With Friends Or Whores, Where Money Makes Up The Difference In Beauty Or Desire.

The Surest Sign That A Man Has A Genuine Taste Of His Own Is That He Is Uncertain Of It.

Drama Is Based On The Mistake. I Think Someone Is My Friend When He Really Is My Enemy, That I Am Free To Marry A Woman When In Fact She Is My Mother, That This Person Is A Chambermaid When It Is A Young Nobleman In Disguise, That This Well-dressed Young Man Is Rich When He Is Really A Penniless Adventurer, Or That If I Do This Such And Such A Result Will Follow When In Fact It Results In Something Very Different. All Good Drama Has Two Movements, First The Making Of The Mistake, Then The Discovery That It Was A Mistake.

Christ Did Not Enchant Men; He Demanded That They Believe In Him: Except On One Occasion, The Transfiguration. For A Brief While, Peter, James, And John Were Permitted To See Him In His Glory. For That Brief While They Had No Need Of Faith. The Vision Vanished, And The Memory Of It Did Not Prevent Them From All Forsaking Him When He Was Arrested, Or Peter From Denying That He Had Ever Known Him.

Accurate Scholarship Can Unearth The Whole Offence From Luther Untill Noe That Has Driven A Culture Mad. From What Occured At Linz What Huge Imago Made A Psychopathic God. I And The Public Know What All Schoolchildren Learn Those To Whom Evil Is Done Do Evil In Return.

Anyone Who Has A Child Today Should Train Him To Be Either A Physicist Or A Ballet Dancer. Then He'll Escape.

Poetry Is The Only Art People Haven't Learned To Consume Like Soup.

I Used To Try And Concentrate The Poem So Much That There Wasn't A Word That Wasn't Essential. This Leads To Becoming Boring And Constipated.

Fate Succumbs Many A Species: One Alone Jeopardises Itself.

Sexual Fidelity Is More Important In A Homosexual Relationship Than In Any Other. In Other Relationships There Are A Variety Of Ties. But Here, Fidelity Is The Only Bond.

But If A Stranger In The Train Asks Me My Occupation, I Never Answer "writer" For Fear That He May Go On To Ask Me What I Write, And To Answer "poetry" Would Embarrass Us Both, For We Both Know That Nobody Can Earn A Living Simply By Writing Poetry.

The Ear Tends To Be Lazy, Craves The Familiar And Is Shocked By The Unexpected; The Eye, On The Other Hand, Tends To Be Impatient, Craves The Novel And Is Bored By Repetition.

Almost All Of Our Relationships Begin And Most Of Them Continue As Forms Of Mutual Exploitation, A Mental Or Physical Barter, To Be Terminated When One Or Both Parties Run Out Of Goods.

Now Is The Age Of Anxiety.

Shall Memory Restore The Steps And The Shore, The Face And The Meeting Place.

When Someone Between Twenty And Forty Says, Apropos Of A Work Of Art, 'i Know What I Like,' He Is Really Saying 'i Have No Taste Of My Own But Accept The Taste Of My Cultural Milieu.

I'll Love You, Dear, I'll Love You Till China And Africa Meet And The River Jumps Over The Mountain And The Salmon Sing In The Street.

Now The Leaves Are Falling Fast, Nurse's Flowers Will Not Last; Nurses To Their Graves Are Gone, And The Prams Go Rolling On.

We Do Not Change As We Grow Up. The Difference Between The Child And The Adult Is That The Former Doesn't Know Who He Is And The Latter Does.

Death Is The Sound Of Distant Thunder At A Picnic.

Marriage Is Rarely Bliss But, Surely It Would Be Worse As Particles To Pelt At Thousands Of Miles Per Sec About A Universe In Which A Lover's Kiss Would Either Not Be Felt Or Break The Loved One's Neck.

People Always Get What They Want. But There Is A Price For Everything. Failures Are Either Those Who Do Not Know What They Want Or Are Not Prepared To Pay The Price Asked Them. The Price Varies From Individual To Individual. Some Get Things At Bargain-sale Prices, Others Only At Famine Prices. But It Is No Use Grumbling. Whatever Price You Are Asked, You Must Pay.

A Poet, Qua Poet, Has Only One Political Duty, Namely, In His Own Writing To Set An Example Of The Correct Use Of His Mother Tongue, Which Is Always Being Corrupted. When Words Lose Their Meaning, Physical Force Takes Over.

The Stars Are Dead. The Animals Will Not Look: We Are Left Alone With Our Day, And The Time Is Short, And History To The Defeated May Say Alas But Cannot Help Nor Pardon.

I Know Nothing, Except What Everyone Knows - If There When Grace Dances, I Should Dance.

A False Enchantment Can All Too Easily Last A Lifetime.

It's Usually The Stupid People That Develop Long Illnesses. You Need More Than Indolence And Selfishness, You Need Endurance To Make A Good Patient.

Clear, Unscaleable Ahead, Rise The Mountains Of Instead From Whose Cold, Cascading Streams None May Drink Except In Dreams

The Desires Of The Heart Are As Crooked As Corkscrews Not To Be Born Is The Best For Man The Second Best Is A Formal Order The Dance's Pattern, Dance While You Can. Dance, Dance, For The Figure Is Easy The Tune Is Catching And Will Not Stop Dance Till The Stars Come Down From The Rafters Dance, Dance, Dance Till You Drop.

I Don't Think The Mystical Experience Can Be Verbalized. When The Ego Disappears, So Does Power Over Language.

Mystical Experiences

All The Literati Keep An Imaginary Friend.

Imaginary Friend

O Let Not Time Deceive You, You Cannot Conquer Time.

Sincerity Is Technique.

By Mourning Tongues The Death Of The Poet Was Kept From His Poems.

Weep For The Lives Your Wishes Never Led.

I Think The First Prerequisite To Civilization Is An Ability To Make Polite Conversation.

Over The Tea-cups And In The Square The Tongue Has Its Desire; Still Waters Run Deep, My Dear, There's Never Smoke Without Fire.

But He Would Have Us Most Of All Remember To Be Enthusiastic Over The Night. Not Only For The Sense Of Wonder It Alone Has To Offer But Also Because It Needs Our Love. For With Sad Eyes Its Delectable Creatures Look Up And Beg Us Dumbly To Ask Them To Follow. They Are Exiles Who Long For A Future That Lies In Our Power.

To Be Happy Means To Be Free, Not From Pain Or Fear, But From Care Or Anxiety.

In Life The Loser's Score Is Always Zero.

If The Most Significant Characteristic Of Man Is The Complex Of Biological Needs He Shares With All Members Of His Species, Then The Best Lives For The Writer To Observe Are Those In Which The Role Of Natural Necessity Is Clearest, Namely, The Lives Of The Very Poor.

The Belief That Politics Can Be Scientific Must Inevitably Produce Tyrannies. Politics Cannot Be A Science, Because In Politics Theory And Practice Cannot Be Separated, And The Sciences Depend Upon Their Separation. Empirical Politics Must Be Kept In Bounds By Democratic Institutions, Which Leave It Up To The Subjects Of The Experiment To Say Whether It Shall Be Tried, And To Stop It If They Dislike It, Because, In Politics, There Is A Distinction, Unknown To Science, Between Truth And Justice.

Our Sufferings And Weaknesses, In So Far As They Are Personal, Are Of No Literary Interest Whatsoever. They Are Only Interesting In So Far As We Can See Them As Typical Of The Human Condition.

Language Is The Mother, Not The Handmaiden, Of Thought; Words Will Tell You Things You Never Thought Or Felt Before.

Stop All The Clocks, Cut Off The Telephone, Prevent The Dog From Barking With A Juicy Bone. Silence The Pianos And With Muffled Drum Bring Out The Coffin, Let The Mourners Come.

Into This Neutral Air Where Blind Skyscrapers Use Their Full Height To Proclaim The Strength Of Collective Man, Each Language Pours Its Vain Competitive Excuse.

No Human Being Is Innocent, But There Is A Class Of Innocent Human Actions Called Games.

Christmas And Easter Can Be Subjects For Poetry, But Good Friday, Like Auschwitz, Cannot. The Reality Is So Horrible It Is Not Surprising That People Should Have Found It A Stumbling Block To Faith.

The Chances Are That, In The Course Of His Lifetime, The Major Poet Will Write More Bad Poems Than The Minor, Simply Because Major Poets Write A Lot.

The Relation Of Faith Between Subject And Object Is Unique In Every Case. Hundreds May Believe, But Each Has To Believe By Himself.

A Writer, Or At Least A Poet, Is Always Being Asked By People Who Should Know Better: “whom Do You Write For?” The Question Is, Of Course, A Silly One, But I Can Give It A Silly Answer. Occasionally I Come Across A Book Which I Feel Has Been Written Especially For Me And For Me Only. Like A Jealous Lover I Don’t Want Anybody Else To Hear Of It. To Have A Million Such Readers, Unaware Of Each Other’s Existence, To Be Read With Passion And Never Talked About, Is The Daydream, Surely, Of Every Author.

History Marched To The Drums Of A Clear Idea...

There Are Not Many English Novels Which Deserve To Be Called Great: Parade's End Is One Of Them.

Without Art, We Should Have No Notion Of The Sacred; Without Science, We Should Always Worship False Gods.

It's Better To Say, 'i'm Suffering,' Than To Say, 'this Landscape Is Ugly.

Men Will Pay Large Sums To Whores For Telling Them They Are Not Bores.

Adjectives Are The Potbelly Of Poetry.

The Older Lives Like Not To Be Stood In Rows Or At Right Angles.

All Wishes, Whatever Their Apparent Content, Have The Same And Unvarying Meaning: "i Refuse To Be What I Am."

The Most Difficult Problem In Personal Knowledge, Whether Of Oneself Or Of Others, Is The Problem Of Guessing When To Think As A Historian And When To Think As An Anthropologist.

Personal Knowledge

An Honest Self-portrait Is Extremely Rare Because A Man Who Has Reached The Degree Of Self-consciousness Presupposed By The Desire To Paint His Own Portrait Has Almost Always Also Developed An Ego-consciousness Which Paints Himself Painting Himself, And Introduces Artificial Highlights And Dramatic Shadows.

A Daydream Is A Meal At Which Images Are Eaten. Some Of Us Are Gourmets, Some Gourmands, And A Good Many Take Their Images Precooked Out Of A Can And Swallow Them Down Whole, Absent-mindedly And With Little Relish.

Lovers Have Lived So Long With Giants And Elves, They Won't Believe Again In Their Own Size.

It's A Pity I Am So Impatient And Careless, As Any Ordinary Person Could Learn All The Techniques Of Photography In A Week. It Is The Democratic Art, I.e. Technical Skill Is Practically Eliminated - The More Foolproof Cameras Become With Focusing And Exposure Gadgets The Better - And Artistic Quality Depends Only On Choice Of Subject.

One Rational Voice Is Dumb: Over A Grave The Household Of Impulse Mourns One Dearly Loved. Sad Is Eros, Builder Of Cities, And Weeping Anarchic Aphrodite.

Of Course, Behaviourism 'works'. So Does Torture. Give Me A No-nonsense, Down-to-earth Behaviourist, A Few Drugs, And Simple Electrical Appliances, And In Six Months I Will Have Him Reciting The Athanasian Creed In Public.

In A Land Which Is Fully Settled, Most Men Must Accept Their Local Environment Or Try To Change It By Political Means; Only The Exceptionally Gifted Or Adventurous Can Leave To Seek His Fortune Elsewhere. In America, On The Other Hand, To Move On And Make A Fresh Start Somewhere Else Is Still The Normal Reaction To Dissatisfaction And Failure.

Proper Names Are Poetry In The Raw. Like All Poetry They Are Untranslatable.

Lost In A Haunted Wood, Children Afraid Of The Night Who Have Never Been Happy Or Good.

Political History Is Far Too Criminal To Be A Fit Subject Of Study For The Young. Children Should Acquire Their Heroes And Villians From Fiction.

Goodness Is Easier To Recognize Than To Define.

Intellectual Disgrace Stares From Every Human Face, And The Seas Of Pity Lie Locked And Frozen In Each Eye.

Art Is Born Of Humiliation.

My Deepest Feeling About Politicians Is That They Are Dangerous Lunatics To Be Avoided When Possible And Carefully Humored; People, Above All, To Whom One Must Never Tell The Truth.

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.

It's Frightfully Important For A Writer To Be His Age, Not To Be Younger Or Older Than He Is. One Might Ask, "what Should I Write At The Age Of Sixty-four," But Never, "what Should I Write In 1940."

To Choose What Is Difficult All One's Days, As If It Were Easy, That Is Faith

Aside From Purely Technical Analysis, Nothing Can Be Said About Music, Except When It Is Bad; When It Is Good, One Can Only Listen And Be Grateful.

A God Who Is Both Self-sufficient And Content To Remain So Could Not Interest Us Enough To Raise The Question Of His Existence.

Some Books Are Undeservedly Forgotten; None Are Undeservedly Remembered.

Composing Mortals With Immortal Fire.

August For The People And Their Favourite Islands. Daily The Steamers Sidle Up To Meet The Effusive Welcome Of The Pier.

The Condition Of Mankind Is, And Always Has Been, So Miserable And Depraved That, If Anyone Were To Say To The Poet: "for God's Sake Stop Singing And Do Something Useful Like Putting On The Kettle Or Fetching Bandages," What Just Reason Could He Give For Refusing?

A Poet Is, Before Anything Else, A Person Who Is Passionately In Love With Language.

The Most Important Truths Are Likely To Be Those Which Society At That Time Least Wants To Hear.

To Save Your World You Asked This Man To Die; Would This Man, Could He See You Now, Ask Why?

Learn From Your Dreams What You Lack.

An Unmanly Sort Of Man Whose Love Life Seems To Have Been Largely Confined To Crying In Laps And Playing Mouse.

To Pray Is To Pay Attention To Something Or Someone Other Than Oneself.

Earth, Receive An Honored Guest; William Yeats Is Laid To Rest. Let The Irish Vessel Lie Emptied Of Its Poetry.

Those Who Hate To Go To Bed Fear Death; Those Who Hate To Get Up Fear Life.

About Suffering They Were Never Wrong, The Old Masters; How Well They Understood Its Human Position; How It Takes Place While Someone Else Is Eating Or Opening A Window Or Just Walking Dully Along.

Machines Are Beneficial To The Degree That They Eliminate The Need For Labor, Harmful To The Degree That They Eliminate The Need For Skill.

As Readers, We Remain In The Nursery Stage So Long As We Cannot Distinguish Between Taste And Judgment, So Long, That Is, As The Only Possible Verdicts We Can Pass On A Book Are Two: This I Like; This I Don't Like. For An Adult Reader, The Possible Verdicts Are Five: I Can See This Is Good And I Like It; I Can See This Is Good But I Don't Like It; I Can See This Is Good And, Though At Present I Don't Like It, I Believe That With Perseverance I Shall Come To Like It; I Can See That This Is Trash But I Like It; I Can See That This Is Trash And I Don't Like It.

If Music In General Is An Imitation Of History, Opera In Particular Is An Imitation Of Human Willfulness; It Is Rooted In The Fact That We Not Only Have Feelings But Insist Upon Having Them At Whatever Cost To Ourselves. The Quality Common To All The Great Operatic Roles, E.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Br?nnhilde, Is That Each Of Them Is A Passionate And Willful State Of Being. In Real Life They Would All Be Bores, Even Don Giovanni.

We Are Not Commanded (or Forbidden) To Love Our Mates, Our Children, Our Friends, Our Country Because Such Affections Come Naturally To Us And Are Good In Themselves, Although We May Corrupt Them. We Are Commanded To Love Our Neighbor Because Our Natural Attitude Toward The Other Is One Of Either Indifference Or Hostility.

If There Are Any Souls In Hell, It Is Because That Is Where They Insist On Being.

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.

Time Will Say Nothing But I Told You So, Time Only Knows The Price We Have To Pay; If I Could Tell You I Would Let You Know.

It Takes Little Talent To See What Lies Under One's Nose, A Good Deal To Know In What Direction To Point That Organ.

Love Each Other Or Perish.

Love Each Other

Life Is A Picnic On A Precipice.

Caesar's Double-bed Is Warm As An Unimportant Clerk Writes I Do Not Like My Work On A Pink Official Form.

If Time Were The Wicked Sheriff In A Horse Opera, I'd Pay For Riding Lessons And Take His Gun Away.

The Ogre Does What Ogres Can, Deeds Quite Impossible For Man, But One Prize Is Beyond His Reach, The Ogre Cannot Master Speech: About A Subjugated Plain, Among Its Desperate And Slain, The Ogre Stalks With Hands On Hips, While Drivel Gushes From His Lips.

The Critical Opinions Of A Writer Should Always Be Taken With A Large Grain Of Salt. For The Most Part, They Are Manifestations Of His Debate With Himself As To What He Should Do Next And What He Should Avoid.

Art Is Our Chief Means Of Breaking Bread With The Dead.

Breaking Silence

Nobody Knows What The Cause Is, Though Some Pretend They Do; It Like Some Hidden Assassin Waiting To Strike At You. Childless Women Get It, And Men When They Retire; It As If There Had To Be Some Outlet For Their Foiled Creative Fire.

You Owe It To All Of Us All Get On With What You're Good At.

Our Claim To Our Own Bodies And Our World Is Our Catastrophe.

Base Words Are Uttered Only By The Base And Can For Such At Once Be Understood; But Noble Platitudes - Ah, There's A Case Where The Most Careful Scrutiny Is Needed To Tell A Voice That's Genuinely Good From One That's Base But Merely Has Succeeded.

A Poet's Hope: To Be, Like Some Valley Cheese, Local, But Prized Elsewhere.

Every Man Carries With Him Through Life A Mirror, As Unique And Impossible To Get Rid Of As His Shadow.

We Who Must Die Demand A Miracle. How Could The Eternal Do A Temporal Act, The Infinite Become A Finite Fact? Nothing Can Save Us That Is Possible: We Who Must Die Demand A Miracle.

Yet No One Hears His Own Remarks As Prose.

No Hero Is Mortal Till He Dies.

Cats Can Be Very Funny, And Have The Oddest Ways Of Showing They're Glad To See You.

All Poets Adore Explosions, Thunderstorms, Tornadoes, Conflagrations, Ruins, Scenes Of Spectacular Carnage. The Poetic Imagination Is Not At All A Desirable Quality In A Statesman.

The Three Wiseman: The Weather Has Been Awful, The Countryside Is Dreary, Marsh, Jungle, Rock; And Echoes Mock, Calling Our Hope Unlawful; But A Silly Song Can Help Along Yours Ever And Sincerely: At Least We Know For Certain That We Are Three Old Sinners, That This Journey Is Much Too Long, That We Want Our Dinners, And Miss Our Wives, Our Books, Our Dogs, But Have Only The Vaguest Idea Why We Are What We Are. To Discover How To Be Human Now Is The Reason We Follow This Star.

Good Can Imagine Evil; But Evil Cannot Imagine Good.

In A World Of Prayer, We Are All Equal In The Sense That Each Of Us Is A Unique Person, With A Unique Perspective On The World, A Member Of A Class Of One.

There's Always Another Story. There's More Than Meets The Eye.

More Than Meets The Eye

Thank God For Books As An Alternative To Conversation.

Private Faces In Public Places Are Wiser And Nicer Than Public Faces In Private Places.

A Verbal Art Like Poetry Is Reflective; It Stops To Think. Music Is Immediate, It Goes On To Become.

One Cannot Walk Through An Assembly Factory And Not Feel That One Is In Hell.

Great Art Is Clear Thinking About Mixed Feelings.

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.

Blessed Be All Metrical Rules That Forbid Automatic Responses, Force Us To Have Second Thoughts, Free Us From The Fetters Of Self.

Warm Are The Still And Lucky Miles, White Shores Of Longing Stretch Away, A Light Of Recognition Fills The Whole Great Day, And Bright The Tiny World Of Lovers' Arms. Silence Invades The Breathing Wood Where Drowsy Limbs A Treasure Keep, Now Greenly Falls The Learned Shade Across The Sleeping Brows And Stirs Their Secret To A Smile. Restored! Returned! The Lost Are Borne On Seas Of Shipwreck Home At Last: See! In A Fire Of Praising Burns The Dry Dumb Past, And We Our Life-day Long Shall Part No More.

Money Cannot Buy The Fuel Of Love But Is Excellent Kindling.

Money Is The Necessity That Frees Us From Necessity.

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William S. Burroughs

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