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You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.

W. H. Auden

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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
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Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
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In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start.
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In a game, just losing is almost as satisfying as just winning... In life the loser's score is always zero.
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An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.
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Time will say nothing but I told you so.
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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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About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters How well they understood Its human position how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.
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A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
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A small grove massacred to the last ash, An oak with heart-rot, give away the show: This great society is going to smash They cannot fool us with how fast they go, How much they cost each other and the gods. A culture is no better than its woods.
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The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews Not to be born is the best for man The second best is a formal order The dance's pattern, dance while you can. Dance, dance, for the figure is easy The tune is catching and will not stop Dance till the stars come down from the rafters Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
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To be free is often to be lonely.
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Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.
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Shall memory restore The steps and the shore, The face and the meeting place.
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I see little hope for a peaceful world until men are excluded from the realm of foreign policy altogether and all decisions concerning international relations are reserved for women, preferably married ones.
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The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again.
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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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Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe.
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A poor American feels guilty at being poor, but less guilty than an American rentier who has inherited wealth but is doing nothingto increase it what can the latter do but take to drink and psychoanalysis?
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To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.
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How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.
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