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Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.

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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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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Travel
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More quotes by W. H. Auden

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There are good books which are only for adults. There are no good books which are only for children.
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A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
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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.
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One can only blaspheme if one believes.
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As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.
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Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
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Defenceless under the night Our world in stupor lies Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.
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Beloved, we are always in the wrong, Handling so clumsily our stupid lives, Suffering too little or too long, Too careful even in our selfish loves: The decorative manias we obey Die in grimaces round us every day, Yet through their tohu-bohu comes a voice Which utters an absurd command - Rejoice.
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By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
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If it form the one landscape that we the inconstant ones Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly Because it dissolves in water.
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Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self.
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A verbal art like poetry is reflective it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
W. H. Auden
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Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.
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Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
W. H. Auden
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Our sufferings and weaknesses, in so far as they are personal, are of no literary interest whatsoever. They are only interesting in so far as we can see them as typical of the human condition.
W. H. Auden
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The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is.
W. H. Auden
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See without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking.
W. H. Auden
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Caesar's double-bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes i do not like my work On a pink official form.
W. H. Auden
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So long as we think of it objectively, time is Fate or Chance, the factor in our lives for which we are not responsible, and about which we can do nothing but when we begin to think of it subjectively, we feel responsible for our time, and the notion of punctuality arises.
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Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.
W. H. Auden