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Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free us from the fetters of Self.
W. H. Auden -
Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
W. H. Auden
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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.
W. H. Auden -
Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.
W. H. 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.
W. H. Auden -
Put the car away; when life fails What's the good of going to Wales? Here am I, here are you: But what does it mean? What are we going to do?
W. H. Auden -
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
W. H. Auden -
It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.
W. H. Auden
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Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.
W. H. Auden -
The trees encountered on a country stroll Reveal a lot about that country's soul ... A culture is no better than its woods.
W. H. Auden -
The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.
W. H. Auden -
A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
W. H. Auden -
All that we are not stares back at what we are.
W. H. Auden -
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
W. H. Auden
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If age, which is certainly Just as wicked as youth, look any wiser, It is only that youth is still able to believe It will get away with anything, while age Knows only too well that it has got away with nothing.
W. H. Auden -
In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of us is a unique person, with a unique perspective on the world, a member of a class of one.
W. H. Auden -
I said earlier that I do not believe an artist's life throws much light upon his works. I do believe, however, that, more often than most people realize, his works may throw light upon his life. An artist with certain imaginative ideas in his head may then involve himself in relationships which are congenial to them.
W. H. Auden -
Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
W. H. Auden -
We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.
W. H. Auden -
No hero is mortal till he dies.
W. H. Auden
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What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
W. H. Auden -
One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
W. H. Auden -
To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however 'good' I may become, remains unchanged.
W. H. Auden -
If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
W. H. Auden