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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.

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
Writing
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Release
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Write
Bomb

More quotes by W. H. Auden

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Alone, alone, about the dreadful wood / Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind, / Dreading to find its Father.
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In life the loser's score is always zero.
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Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
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The friends who met here and embraced are gone, Each to his own mistake.
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Beauty, midnight, vision dies: Let the winds of dawn that blow Softly round your dreaming head Such a day of welcome show Eye and knocking heart may bless, Find our mortal world enough Noons of dryness find you fed By the involuntary powers, Nights of insult let you pass Watched by every human love.
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All pity is self-pity.
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Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
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Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.
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A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.
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To choose what is difficult all one's days, as if it were easy, that is faith
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Goodness is easier to recognize than to define.
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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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Had Greek civilization never existed ... we would never have become fully conscious.
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It's better to say, 'I'm suffering,' than to say, 'This landscape is ugly.
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We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.
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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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Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred without Science, we should always worship false gods.
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The poet who writes free verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.
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Nobody is ever sent to Hell: he or she insists on going there.
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Composing mortals with immortal fire.
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