W. H. Auden Quotes

How strange and awful is the synthesis of life and death in the gusty winds and falling leaves of an autumnal day!

Nothing is more fleeting than external form, which withers and alters like the flowers of the field at the appearance of autumn.

Spring flies, and with it all the train it leads; and flowers, in fading, leave us but their seeds.

The damps of autumn sink into the leaves and prepare them for the necessity of their fall; and thus insensibly are we, as years close around us, detached from our tenacity of life by the gentle pressure of recorded sorrow.

A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes; the leaves falling like our years, the flowers fading like our hours, the clouds fleeting like our illusions, the light diminishing like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives--all bear secret relations to our destinies.

When you really deep down look at it, we go to bed every night, get up every morning, stay here for 70 or 80 years, and then we die.

These trees and these old people have one thing in common, they're both going in the ground soon!

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Our birth is nothing but our death begun, As tapers waste the moment they take fire.

It is natural to die as to be born.

All around me darkness gathers, Fading is the sun that shone, We must speak of other matters, You can be me when I'm gone Flowers gathered in the morning, Afternoon they blossom on, Still are withered in the evening, You can be me when I'm gone.

What a simple thing death is, just as simple as the falling of an autumn leaf.

What visionary tints the year puts on, When falling leaves falter through motionless air Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone! How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare, As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills The bowl between me and those distant hills, And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair!

The Autumn is old; The sere leaves are flying; He hath gather'd up gold, And now he is dying;- Old age, begin sighing!

All human beings are like travelers floating down the eternal river of time, embarking at a certain point and disembarking again at another point in order to make room for others waiting below the river to come aboard.

Look at the fate of summer flowers, which blow at daybreak, droop ere even-song.

We are dust and to dust return. In the end we're neither air, nor fire, nor water, just dirt, neither more nor less, just dirt, and maybe some yellow flowers.

Every day a new picture is painted and framed, held up for half an hour, in such lights as the Great Artist chooses, and then withdrawn, and the curtain falls. And then the sun goes down, and long the afterglow gives light.

Day buries day; month, month; and year the year: Our life is but a chain of many deaths.

We begin to die as soon as we are born, and the end is linked to the beginning.

Birth was the death of him.

To live is to die.

The goal of all life is death.