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The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have Not universal love But to be loved alone.

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
Cannot
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Persons
Universal
Bone
Important
Normal
Crave
Heart
Loved
Trash
Men
Alone
Error
Craves
Love
Woman
Mad
Bred
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Bones
Militant
True
Errors
Shout

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Man desires to be free and he desires to feel important. This places him in a dilemma, for the more he emancipates himself from necessity the less important he feels.
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Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.
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As a rule, it was the pleasure-haters who became unjust.
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If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor.
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All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: I refuse to be what I am.
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In the end, art is small beer. The really serious things are earning one's living so as not to be a parasite and loving one's neighbor.
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Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the differences between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.
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Drama began as the act of a whole community. Ideally, there would be no speculators. In practice, every member of the audience should feel like an understudy.
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To have a sense of sin means to feel guilty at there being an ethical choice to make, a guilt which, however good I may become, remains unchanged.
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I just try to put the thing out and hope somebody will read it. Someone says: 'Whom do you write for?' I reply: 'Do you read me?' If they say 'Yes,' I say, 'Do you like it?' If they say 'No,' then I say, 'I don't write for you.'
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And none will hear the postman’s knock Without a quickening of the heart. For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
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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.
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Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon world affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit A social science.
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What living occasion can, Be just to the absent?
W. H. Auden
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You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.
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Fate succumbs many a species: one alone jeopardises itself.
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Weep for the lives your wishes never led.
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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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The eye likes novelty, but the ear craves familiarity.
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What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.
W. H. Auden