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How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.

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
Like
Burn
Affection
Loving
Equal
Return
Passion
Stars

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How happy the lot of the mathematician. He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so high that no colleague or rival can ever win a reputation he does not deserve.
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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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One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
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A shilling life will give you all the facts.
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I see little hope for a peaceful world until men are excluded from the realm of foreign policy altogether and all decisions concerning international relations are reserved for women, preferably married ones.
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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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Human beings are, necessarily, actors who...can be divided...into the sane who know they are acting and the mad who do not.
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The friends who met here and embraced are gone, Each to his own mistake.
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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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Let me see what I wrote so I know what I think
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Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye.
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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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Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss
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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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A poet feels the impulse to create a work of art when the passive awe provoked by an event is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship.
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With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse
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What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts?
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When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.
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Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes: Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.
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History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
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