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You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.

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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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
Think
Secrets
Thinking
Relation
People
England
Quite
Secret
Two
America
Different
Shared

More quotes by W. H. Auden

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As a rule, it was the pleasure-haters who became unjust.
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Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly, The spot on your skin is a shocking disease.
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The condition of mankind is, and always has been, so miserable and depraved that, if anyone were to say to the poet: For God's sake stop singing and do something useful like putting on the kettle or fetching bandages, what just reason could he give for refusing?
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Let all your thinks be thanks.
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Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay If I could tell you I would let you know.
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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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Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free us from the fetters of Self.
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The basic stimulus to the intelligence is doubt, a feeling that the meaning of an experience is not self-evident.
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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.
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We must love one another or die
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In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune elsewhere. In America, on the other hand, to move on and make a fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reaction to dissatisfaction and failure.
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the child unlucky in his little State, Some hearth where freedom is excluded, A hive whose honey is fear and worry, Feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape
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Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered.
W. H. Auden
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Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for their own good -- we are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know -- and the masses have no right whatsoever to resist them.
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A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.
W. H. Auden
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The nightingales are sobbing in The orchards of our mothers, And hearts that we broke long ago Have long been breaking others Tears are round, the sea is deep: Roll them overboard and sleep.
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What living occasion can, Be just to the absent?
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Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
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About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters How well they understood Its human position how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.
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Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
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