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Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to come from myself, from such display of intelligence, wit and malice as I can contrive. One cannot review a bad book without showing off.

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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Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe.
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We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.
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Soft as the earth is mankind and both need to be altered.
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Accurate scholarship can unearth the whole offence from luther untill noe that has driven a culture mad. From what occured at linz what huge imago made a psychopathic god. i and the public know what all schoolchildren learn those to whom evil is done do evil in return.
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Money cannot buy the fuel of love but is excellent kindling.
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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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Cathedrals, luxury liners laden with souls, Holding to the east their hulls of stone.
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The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.
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A poet, qua poet, has only one political duty, namely, in his own writing to set an example of the correct use of his mother tongue, which is always being corrupted. When words lose their meaning, physical force takes over.
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'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'
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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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Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
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As biological organisms made of matter, we are subject to the laws of physics and biology: as conscious persons who create our own history we are free to decide what that history shall be. Without science, we should have no notion of equality without art, no notion of liberty.
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My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
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A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.
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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.
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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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To hunt for symbols in a fairy tale is absolutely fatal.
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