#at

Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be. ↗

— W. H. Auden

#action #attention #both #cases #choice

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. ↗

— W. H. Auden

#anything #before #else #language #love

All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation. ↗

— W. H. Auden

#addictive #damnation #point #sins #tend

'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.' ↗

— W. H. Auden

#healing #intuitive #me #nature #papa

We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons. ↗

— W. H. Auden

#places #shy #sunny #these #where

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return. ↗

— W. H. Auden

#cannot #cardinal #driven #impatience #only

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. ↗

— W. H. Auden

#any #creation #emotion #everything #fleeting

Anticipating that most poetry will be worse than carrying heavy luggage through O'Hare Airport, the public, to its loss, reads very little of it. ↗

— Russell Baker

#anticipating #carrying #hare #heavy #little

Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel. ↗

— W. H. Auden

#enter #good #hemingway #his #into

When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes. ↗

— W. H. Auden

#company #curate #drawing #dukes #feel