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Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.

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
Humans
Love
Faithless
Sleeping
Lays
Arms
Head
Sleep
Human

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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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No person can be a great leader unless he takes genuine joy in the successes of those under him.
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Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.
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Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
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It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful.
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One can only blaspheme if one believes.
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To make one, there must be two.
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The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.
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Get up very early and get going at once. In fact, work first and wash afterwards.
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If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
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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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My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible and carefully humored people, above all, to whom one must never tell the truth.
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Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.
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I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.
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Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
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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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To hunt for symbols in a fairy tale is absolutely fatal.
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Let me see what I wrote so I know what I think
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