W. H. Auden Quotes
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It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, 'What should I write at the age of sixty-four,' but never, 'What should I write in 1940.'
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Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.
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Let us honour if we canThe vertical manThough we value noneBut the horizontal one.
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If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
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They never forgot That even the most dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
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Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
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In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
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One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
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Unfortunately for the modern dramatist, during the past century and a half the public realm has been less and less of a realm where human deeds are done, and more and more of a realm of mere human behavior. The contemporary dramatist has lost his natural subject.
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I never write when I'm drunk. Why should one need aids? The Muse is a high-spirited girl who doesn't like to be brutally or coarsely wooed. And she doesn't like slavish devotion - then she lies.
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In the late Middle Ages there were, no doubt, many persons in monasteries and convents who had no business there and should have been out in the world earning an honest living, but today it may very well be that there are many persons trying to earn a living in the world and driven by failure into mental homes whose true home would be the cloister.
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He was my North, my South, my East and West,My working week and my Sunday rest,My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
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God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.
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You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.
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To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
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A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.
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No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.
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Acts of injustice done Between the setting and the rising sun In history lie like bones, each one.
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Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.
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The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods; For nothing now can ever come to any good.
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A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
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Lines 10–16
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The stars are dead. The animals will not look. We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.
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In any modern city, a great deal of our energy has to be expended in not seeing, not hearing, not smelling. An inhabitant of New York who possessed the sensory acuteness of an African Bushman would very soon go mad.