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Thank God for books as an alternative to conversation.

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
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More quotes by W. H. Auden

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There is a great deal of difference in believing something still, and believing it again.
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Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse.
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I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.
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We are all here on earth to help others what on earth the others are here for I don't know.
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The nightingales are sobbing in The orchards of our mothers, And hearts that we broke long ago Have long been breaking others Tears are round, the sea is deep: Roll them overboard and sleep.
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My poetry doesn't change from place to place - it changes with the years. It's very important to be one's age. You get ideas you have to turn down - 'I'm sorry, no longer' 'I'm sorry, not yet.
W. H. Auden
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Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.
W. H. Auden
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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.
W. H. Auden
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It is, for example, axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.
W. H. Auden
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A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.
W. H. Auden
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Had Greek civilization never existed ... we would never have become fully conscious.
W. H. Auden
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The most difficult problem in personal knowledge, whether of oneself or of others, is the problem of guessing when to think as a historian and when to think as an anthropologist.
W. H. Auden
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Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity. Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money. Compared with him even Balzac is a romantic.
W. H. Auden
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Poetry is the only art people haven't learned to consume like soup.
W. H. Auden
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There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem From insignificance.
W. H. Auden
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Acts of injustice done Between the setting and the rising sun In history lie like bones, each one.
W. H. Auden
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Dogmatic theological statements are neither logical propositions nor poetic utterances. They are ''shaggy dog'' stories they have a point, but he who tries too hard to get it will miss it.
W. H. Auden
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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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Cats can be very funny, and have the oddest ways of showing they're glad to see you.
W. H. Auden
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Of course,Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture.
W. H. Auden