W. H. Auden Quotes

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

If you would be unloved and forgotten, be reasonable.

And then when all around grows dark, when we feel utterly alone, when all men right and left pass us by and know us not, a forgotten feeling rises in the breast.

There's a lot of days where you feel forgotten.

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

That which happens to the soil when it ceases to be cultivated by the social man happens to man himself when he foolishly forsakes society for solitude; the brambles grow up in his desert heart.

I've never been in love. I've dreamt of it day and night, but my heart is like a fine piano no one can play because the key is lost.

I was lonelier than I should be, for a woman in love, or half in love.

Guilt is the one burden human beings can't bear alone.

My life is like a lone, forgotten Q-Tip in the second-to-last drawer.

I've decided that the worst part of loneliness isn't being alone. It's being forgotten.

I look for places like me: big, hollow, forgotten by most everyone.

What have I to do with millions [of people]? The eighty I know despise me.

There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the tiniest outward agreement with the first person who comes along.

I cry for everything I abandoned and because I, too, have been left behind -- by Alex, by my mom, by time that has cut through our worlds and separated us.

How sad it must be for you to be nothing more than a hollow statue, to have your tomb preserved and your story forgotten.

Everything hurt. I closed my eyes, pressing my cheek to the street, and waited. What for, I didn't know. To be rescued. Or found. But no one came. All I'd ever thought I wanted was to be left alone. Until I was.

The clothes are packed off to Goodwill I said my good-byes up on the hill The house is empty, the furniture sold Soon your smell will decay to mold Don't know why I bother calling, ain't nobody answering Don't know why I bother singing, ain't nobody listening "Disconnect" Collateral Damage, Track 10

I've never really been wanted.

There is a core of loneliness. It's partly existential. Secondly, I was raised a loner. My parents were not there. My father was asked to leave because he couldn't metabolize ethanol. Actually, my mother ran away with us when I was 2 months old and my brother was 5. Real dramatic stuff: down the fire escape, through backyards. So, I sort of raised myself. I was alone a lot and I invented myself - I lived through the radio and through my imagination.

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the hunger of my heart, I am trying to bribe you with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

The wretched have no friends.

Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. One keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there, nevertheless, and one hardly dares think of how he would feel if all this were taken away.

Not much touches us, but we long to be touched. We lie awake at night willing the darkness to part and show us a vision.

Johnny, can't you come out to play in your empty garden?