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Auden Quotes

Quotes tagged as "auden" Showing 1-25 of 25
Sarah Dessen
“Sometimes a question can hurt more than an answer.”
Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride

Sarah Dessen
“I don't know," I said. "What else did you do for your first eighteen years?"
"Like I said," he said as I unlocked the car, "I'm not so sure that you should go by my example."
"Why not?"
"Because I have my regrets," he said. "Also, I'm a guy. And guys do different stuff."
"Like ride bikes?" I said.
"No," he replied. "Like have food fights. And break stuff. And set off firecrackers on people's front porches. And..."
"Girls can't set off firecrackers on people's front porches?"
"They can," he said... "But they're smart enough not to. That's the difference.”
Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride

Helen Bevington
“The seasonal urge is strong in poets. Milton wrote chiefly in winter. Keats looked for spring to wake him up (as it did in the miraculous months of April and May, 1819). Burns chose autumn. Longfellow liked the month of September. Shelley flourished in the hot months. Some poets, like Wordsworth, have gone outdoors to work. Others, like Auden, keep to the curtained room. Schiller needed the smell of rotten apples about him to make a poem. Tennyson and Walter de la Mare had to smoke. Auden drinks lots of tea, Spender coffee; Hart Crane drank alcohol. Pope, Byron, and William Morris were creative late at night. And so it goes.”
Helen Bevington, When Found, Make a Verse of

Sarah Dessen
“Why should I even bother? What's the point, really?"
He thought for a moment. "Who says there has to be a point?" he asked. "Or a reason. Maybe it's just something you have to do.”
Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride

W.H. Auden
“There are good books which are only for adults.
There are no good books which are only for children.”
W.H. Auden

Sarah Dessen
“Nope.' He sat back. 'Just been there, done that. Done that getting hauled to the police station thing because of it, too.I appreciate your quest and everything, but I have to draw the line somewhere.'
'Wait,' I said, holding up my hand. 'My quest?'
He turned to look at me. We were at a red light, no other cars were anywhere in sight. 'Yeah,' he said. 'You know, like in Lord of the Rings, or Star Wars. You're searching for something you lost or need. It's a quest.'
I just looked at him.
'Maybe it's a guy thing,' he said. 'Fine, don't call it a quest. Call it chicken salad, I don't care. My point is, I'm in, but within reason. That's all I'm saying.”
Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride

Sarah Dessen
“This thought was interrupted, suddenly, by a crash from the front entrance. We all looked over just in time to see Adam bending back from the glass, rubbing his arm.
"Pull open," Maggie called out. As Leah rolled her eyes, she said, "He never remembers. It's so weird.”
Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride

Sarah Dessen
“[Adam picks up the camera] "I have to get a shot of this."
The reaction in the room was swift, and unanimous: every single person except me raised their hands at once to cover their faces. The accompanying utterances, though, were varied. I heard everything from "Please no" (Maggie), to "Jesus Christ" (Wallace), to "Stop it or die" (I'm assuming it's obvious).”
Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride

Sarah Dessen
“I trailed off and he didn't push me to finish. I was finding that I liked that.”
Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride
tags: auden

W.H. Auden
“Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.”
W.H. Auden

Sarah Dessen
“It was like reaching for someone's hand, then missing their fingers, or even their arm, and hitting their shoulder instead. But no matter. You hang on tight anyway.”
Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride
tags: auden

Sarah Dessen
“My point is you're different here.
Hollis I've only been here for a month.
A lot can happen in a month he replied. Shoot in two weeks I met my future wife changed my entire life's trajectory and bought my first tie.
You bought a tie I asked. Because honestly this was the most shocking part.”
Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride

Sarah Dessen
“Hollis " I said "you're messing with me right now aren't you You're in Paris or somewhere and just-"
"What " he replied. "No This is the real deal. Here I'll prove it."
There was a muffled noise followed by some static. Then I heard my mother recite at a distance in her most droll flat tone "Yes. It is true. Your brother is in love and in my kitchen.”
Sarah Dessen, Along for the Ride

W.H. Auden
“So I wish you first a
Sense of theatre; only
Those who love illusion
And know it will go far:
Otherwise we spend our
Lives in a confusion
Of what we say and do with
Who we really are.”
W.H. Auden

Stephen Greenblatt
“In short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.”
Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

David Mitchell
“Mental maps. Maps with edges. And for Auden, for so many of us, it's the edges of the maps that fascinate...”
David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

W.H. Auden
“Thoughts on his own death, like the distant roll of thunder at a picnic.”
W. H. Auden, A Certain World: A Commonplace Book

W.H. Auden
“Lovers running each to each
Feel such timid dreams catch fire
Blazing as they touch,
Learn what love alone can teach:
Happy on a tousled bed
Praise Blake's acumen who said:
'One thing only we require
Of each other; we must see
In another's lineaments
Gratified desire';
That is our humanity;
Nothing else contents.”
W.H. Auden

“Auden is an accomplished rhymer and Shakespeare is not.”
Peter Porter

W.H. Auden
“for once in our lives / Everything became a You and nothing was an It.”
W. H. Auden

W.H. Auden
“In all ages, the technique of the Black Magician has been essentially the same. In all spells the words are deprived of their meanings and reduced to syllables or verbal noises. This may be done literally, as when magicians used to recite the Lord’s Prayer backwards, or by reiterating a word over and over again as loudly as possible until it has become a mere sound. For millions of people today, words like communism, capitalism, imperialism, peace, freedom, democracy, have ceased to be words, the meaning of which can be inquired into and discussed, and have become right or wrong noises to which the response is as involuntary as a knee-reflex.

It makes no difference if the magic is being employed simply for the aggrandizement of the magician himself or if, as is more usual, he claims to be serving some good cause. Indeed, the better the cause he claims to be serving, the more evil he does…. Propaganda, like the sword, attempts to eliminate consent or dissent and, in our age, magical language has to a great extent replaced the sword.”
W.H. Auden, Secondary worlds: The T. S. Eliot memorial lectures delivered at Eliot College in the University of Kent at Canterbury, October 1967,

Steven  Rowley
“What do you think of when you think of mourning?' Jenny asks.
The question snaps me back to attention. I answer without really thinking. "I guess 'Funeral Blues' by W.H. Auden. I think it was Auden. I suppose that's not very original.'
'I don't know it.'
'It's a poem.'
'I gathered.'
'I'm just clarifying. It's not a blues album.'
Jenny ignores my swipe at her intelligence.
'Does your response need to be original? Isn't that what poetry is for, for the poet to express something so personal that it ultimately is universal?'
I shrug. Who is Jenny, even new Jenny, to say what poetry is for? Who am I for that matter?
'Why do you thin of that poem in particular?'
"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.'
I learned the poem in college and it stuck.”
Steven Rowley, Lily and the Octopus

Alan Jacobs
“(With perhaps pardonable exaggeration, Auden remarked of Kierkegaard that one 'could read through the whole of his voluminous works without discovering that human beings are not ghosts but have bodies of flesh and blood.') And for Auden this deficiency is properly described as theological: Kierkegaard, and other Christian thinkers who share his disregard for embodied human nature, neglect clear and vital Christian teaching about God's redeeming love for this physical world, this whole Creation.

(The Poet's Prose)”
Alan Jacobs, Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant

Alan Jacobs
“Much later in his life, Auden would borrow a musical metaphor from Dietrich Bonhoeffer and say that Kierkegaard was a 'monodist, who can hear with particular acuteness one theme in the New Testament -- in his case, the theme of suffering and sacrifice -- but is deaf to its rich polyphony.' And for the Auden who emerges in the pages of this volume [Prose, Volume III: 1949-1955], the unique power of Christian doctrine is its polyphonic character, its capacity to address every dimension of our being, to give a comprehensive account of how history and nature relate, and -- decisively in Christ's incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection -- how they may be reconciled.

(The Poet's Prose)”
Alan Jacobs, Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant

Alan Jacobs
“As a spirit, a conscious person endowed with free will, every man has, through faith and grace, a unique 'existential' relation to God, and few since St. Augustine have described this relation more profoundly than Kierkegaard. But every man has a second relation to God which is neither unique nor existential: as a creature composed of matter, as a biological organism, is related by necessity to the God who created that universe and saw that it was good, for the laws of nature to which, whether he likes it or not, he must conform are of divine origin.
And it is with this body, with faith or without it, that all good works are done.

(W.H. Auden)
(The Poet's Prose)”
Alan Jacobs, Wayfaring: Essays Pleasant and Unpleasant