Quotes from Wystan Hugh Auden

The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.

To ask the hard question is simple.

We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don't know.

Weep for the lives your wishes never led.

To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.