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It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.

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
Happens
Commit
America
Scary
Anything
Murder
Back
England
Feels
Drink
Restraints
Much
Happen
Restraint
Easy
Frightening
Social
Holding

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Base words are uttered only by the base And can for such at once be understood But noble platitudes - ah, there's a case Where the most careful scrutiny is needed To tell a voice that's genuinely good From one that's base but merely has succeeded.
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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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Life is a picnic on a precipice.
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To discover how to be human now is the reason we follow this star.
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We do not change as we grow up. The difference between the child and the adult is that the former doesn't know who he is and the latter does.
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Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
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Cathedrals, luxury liners laden with souls, Holding to the east their hulls of stone.
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The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again.
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One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.
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But he would have us most of all remember to be enthusiastic over the night. Not only for the sense of wonder it alone has to offer but also because it needs our love. For with sad eyes its delectable creatures look up and beg us dumbly to ask them to follow. They are exiles who long for a future that lies in our power.
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Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their affection and firm enough to command their respect, the result is an orderly happy household. If he is too tyrannical, they give notice if he lacks authority, they become slovenly, impertinent, drunk and dishonest.
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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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Machines are beneficial to the degree that they eliminate the need for labor, harmful to the degree that they eliminate the need for skill.
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Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art.
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A writer is a maker, not a man of action: his private life is of no concern to anybody but himself, his family and his friends.
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Pleasure is by no means an infallible critical guide, but it is the least fallible.
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To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.
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You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-obje ct look.
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Those who will not reason, perish in the act. Those who will not act, perish for that reason.
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