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Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
W. H. Auden
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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
Author
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Writer
Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Unique
Abolish
Direct
Grant
Crime
Behalf
Party
Grants
Interest
Forgiveness
Society
Murder
Abolishes
Place
Victim
Injures
Take
Demand
Atonement
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Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
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In the end, art is small beer. The really serious things are earning one's living so as not to be a parasite and loving one's neighbor.
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America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an élite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment.
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The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
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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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In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
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No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
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You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire.
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You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.
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Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.
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All pity is self-pity.
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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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The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most part, they are manifestations of his debate with himself as to what he should do next and what he should avoid.
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The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.
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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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Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
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Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe.
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If we really want to live, we'd better start at once to try.
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Cats can be very funny, and have the oddest ways of showing they're glad to see you.
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I think the first prerequisite to civilization is an ability to make polite conversation.
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