W. H. Auden Quotes
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A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.
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I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night.
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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.
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I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.
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Clear, unscaleable ahead, Rise the mountains of instead From whose cold, cascading streams None may drink except in dreams
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The trees encountered on a country stroll Reveal a lot about that country's soul ... A culture is no better than its woods.
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The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
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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.
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The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.
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Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
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Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labor, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill.
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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.
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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?
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The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.
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Ideally, government is the means by which all the individual wills are assured complete freedom of moral choice and at the same time prevented from ever clashing.
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All that we are not stares back at what we are.
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We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.
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Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
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The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
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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.
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No hero is mortal till he dies.
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The parlour cars and Pullmans are packed also with scented assassins, salad-eaters who murder on milk.
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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.
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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.