W. H. Auden Quotes
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Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
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Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
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If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.
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Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
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Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
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All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: 'I refuse to be what I am.'
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The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is.
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The thin-lipped armorer, Hephaestos, hobbled away, Thetis of the shining breasts Cried out in dismay At what the god had wrought To please her son, the strong Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles Who would not live long.
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Sad is Eros, builder of cities, And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.
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Learn from your dreams what you lack.
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Art is born of humiliation.
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Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
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Marriage is rarely bliss But, surely it would be worse As particles to pelt At thousands of miles per sec About a universe In which a lover's kiss Would either not be felt Or break the loved one's neck.
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My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
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Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse.
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The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish.
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I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.
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I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the mountain and the salmon sing in the street.
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When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes.
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Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
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History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
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Whatever the field under discussion, those who engage in debate must not only believe in each other's good faith, but also in their capacity to arrive at the truth.
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Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
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Unendowed with wealth or pity, Little birds with scarlet legs Sitting on their speckled eggs, Eye each flu-infected city. Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss, Silently and very fast.