W. H. Auden Quotes
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
W. H. Auden
Quotes to Explore
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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.
W. H. Auden
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Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
W. H. Auden
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Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
W. H. Auden
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Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountains start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.
W. H. Auden
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My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
W. H. Auden
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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.
W. H. Auden
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Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
W. H. Auden
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A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
W. H. Auden
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To ask the hard question is simple, The simple act of the confused will.
W. H. Auden
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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.
W. H. Auden
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The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar and is shocked by the unexpected; the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.
W. H. Auden
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Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without Science, we should always worship false gods.
W. H. Auden
