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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

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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
Author
Composer
Essayist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Happy
Passionate
Everything
Result
Time
However
Like
Marriage
Involuntary
Creation
Infinitely
Emotion
Fleeting
Results
Romance
Interesting
Unhappy

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My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
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One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.
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A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
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God is Love, we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word.
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A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
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A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.
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What living occasion can, Be just to the absent?
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Now is the age of anxiety.
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Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye.
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Few people take an interest in Iceland, but in those few the interest is passionate.
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There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them.
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Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral
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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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What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?
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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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There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art?
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Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.
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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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