W. H. Auden

"Private faces in public places Are wiser and nicer Than public faces in private places."

"The sky is darkening like a stain, Something is going to fall like rain And it wont be flowers."

"I see it often since you’ve been away: The island, the veranda, and the fruit; The tiny steamer breaking from the bay; The literary mornings with its hoot; Our ugly comic servant; and then you, Lovely and willing every afternoon."

"At the far end of the enormous room An orchestra is playing to the rich."

"Im beginning to lose patience With my personal relations: They are not deep, And they are not cheap."

"Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read The Hunters waking thoughts."

"This is the Night Mail crossing the Border, Bringing the cheque and the postal order,Letters for the rich, letters for the poor, The shop at the corner, the girl next door.Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb: The gradients against her, but she’s on time.Past cotton-grass and moorland border, Shovelling white steam over her shoulder."

"Letters of thanks, letters from banks, Letters of joy from girl and boy, Receipted bills and invitations To inspect new stock or to visit relations, And applications for situations, And timid lovers declarations, And gossip, gossip from all the nations."

"Acts of injustice done Between the setting and the rising sun In history lie like bones, each one."

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

"Left to itself the masculine imagination has very little appreciation for the here and now; it prefers to dwell on what is absent, on what has been or may be. If men are more punctual than women, it is because they know that, without the external discipline of clock time, they would never get anything done."

"Auden is something of an intellectual jackdaw, picking up bright pebbles of ideas so as to fit them into exciting conceptual patterns."