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.

— W.H. Auden

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.

— W.H. Auden

Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

— W.H. Auden

Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look-out for curious prosaic fauna like Bacchic and chorales.

— W.H. Auden

Evil is unspectacular and always human, And shares our bed and eats at our own table ....

— W.H. Auden

Follow, poet, follow righto the bottom of the night, With your constraining 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.

— W.H. Auden

Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read The hunter's waking thoughts.

— W.H. Auden

He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

— W.H. Auden

He who despises himself, nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despised. (Dietz

— W.H. Auden

I am sure it is everyone’s experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew.

— W.H. Auden