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The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.
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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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Towers
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From beginning to end Wilde performed his life and continued to do so even after fame had taken the plot out of his own hands.
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A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
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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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Fate succumbs many a species: one alone jeopardises itself.
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The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again.
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He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
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I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.
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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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What living occasion can, Be just to the absent?
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All I have is a voice to undo the folded lie, the romantic lie in the brain of the sensual man-in-the-street and the lie of Authority whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State and no one exists alone Hunger allows no choice to the citizen or the police We must love one another or die.
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Let me see what I wrote so I know what I think
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The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.
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We till shadowed days are done, We must weep and sing Duty's conscious wrong, The Devil in the clock
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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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Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
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Aside from purely technical analysis, nothing can be said about music, except when it is bad when it is good, one can only listen and be grateful.
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The Americans are violently oral. That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all -- isn't respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.
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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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There was still gold and silver in the mountains, And hunger was a more immediate sorrow
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