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All the rest is silence On the other side of the wall, And the silence ripeness, And the ripeness all.

W. H. Auden

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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
Author
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Essayist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
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Poet
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University Teacher
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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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Ripeness
Wall
Silence
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The camera may do justice to laughter, but must degrade sorrow.
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A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.
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All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.
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A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
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Let all your thinks be thanks.
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Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
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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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The lights must never go out, The music must always play
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Hunger allows no choice.
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The condition of mankind is, and always has been, so miserable and depraved that, if anyone were to say to the poet: For God's sake stop singing and do something useful like putting on the kettle or fetching bandages, what just reason could he give for refusing?
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Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too personal style.
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Man is a history-making creature, who can neither repeat his past, nor leave it behind.
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He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
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And make us as Newton was, who in his garden watching The apple falling towards England, became aware Between himself and her of an eternal tie.
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Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.
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