W. H. Auden Quotes

I am weary of happiness, both as a word and as a concept.

Her blog was doing well, with thousands of unique visitors each month, and she was earning good speaking fees, and she had a fellowship at Princeton and a relationship with Blaine - "You are the absolute love of my life," he'd written in her last birthday card - and yet there was cement in her soul. It had been there for a while, an early morning disease of fatigue, shapeless desires, brief imaginary glints of other lives she could be living, that over the months melded into a piercing homesickness.

When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my rusty lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the most devilish pain burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. - Harry Haller

I'd never been content in America.

My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.

Nothing seems to me so likely to make people unhappy in themselves and at variance with others as the habit of killing time.

I never loved the world around me as it was.

The discontented man finds no easy chair.

May we not look for Discontent, Mistrust, Disaffection to Government and frequent Insurrections?

I feel like I was born in the wrong time.

The man who is dissatisfied with himself, what can he do?

So much of my intention with songs is to voice a continual dissatisfaction, or at least to claw my way out of it.

I'm fed up of doing run-of-the-mill stuff.

It's a blessing and a curse, 'cause I'm never satisfied, so I continually want to outdo myself. But still, I'm never happy.

Behind the driven person is just an enormous amount of misery. You have to be miserable with the status quo to want to change it.

In other words: It seems to me that I will always be happy in the place where I am not. Or, more bluntly: Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself. Or else, taking the bull by the horns: Anywhere out of the world.

Then I realized what separated us: what I thought about him could not reach him; it was psychology, the kind they write about in books. But his judgment went through me like a sword and questioned my very right to exist. And it was true, I had always realized it; I hadn't the right to exist. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant or a microbe. My life put out feelers towards small pleasures in every direction. Sometimes it sent out vague signals; at other times I felt nothing more than a harmless buzzing.

We have produced a world of contented bodies and discontented minds.

Her life was a slow realization that the world was not for her and that for whatever reason she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. table ivory elephant charm rainbow onion hairdo violence melodrama honey...None of it moved her. She addressed the world honestly searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her but to each she would have to say I don't love you.

Unhappiness really meant something back then. Now it's just a drag, like a cold or having no money.

Countries like ours are full of people who have all of the material comforts they desire, yet lead lives of quiet (and at times noisy) desperation, understanding nothing but the fact that there is a hole inside them and that however much food and drink they pour into it, however many motorcars and television sets they stuff it with, however many well-balanced children and loyal friends they parade around the edges of it. . . it aches!

This world is gradually becoming a place Where I do not care to be any more.

Nothing satisfies an individual incapable of enjoyment.

We deny our nature to build and create and then wonder why there is so much alienation and dissatisfaction.