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The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.

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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Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
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The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.
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It's better to say, 'I'm suffering,' than to say, 'This landscape is ugly.
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Let us honor if we can the vertical man, though we value none but the horizontal one
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Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.
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Fate succumbs many a species: one alone jeopardises itself.
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Good can imagine Evil but Evil cannot imagine Good.
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To ask the hard question is simple.
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The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.
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Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character it is just as credible that a stupid person should sing beautifully as that a clever person should do so.
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We were put on this Earth to help others. Why others were put here is beyond me.
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Over the tea-cups and in the square the tongue has its desire Still waters run deep, my dear, there's never smoke without fire.
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I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky.
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August for the people and their favourite islands. Daily the steamers sidle up to meet The effusive welcome of the pier.
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It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.
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One rational voice is dumb: over a grave The household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved. Sad is Eros, builder of cities, And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.
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Drama is based on the Mistake.
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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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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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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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