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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.

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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All pity is self-pity.
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You shall love your crooked neighbour, with your crooked heart.
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The definition of prayer is paying careful and concentrated attention to something other than your own constructions.
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God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
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Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear what-is-not is the profundity of what-is.
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If age, which is certainly Just as wicked as youth, look any wiser, It is only that youth is still able to believe It will get away with anything, while age Knows only too well that it has got away with nothing.
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The poet who writes free verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.
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Love each other or perish.
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The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.
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No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
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Clear, unscaleable ahead, Rise the mountains of instead From whose cold, cascading streams None may drink except in dreams
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In the end, art is small beer. The really serious things are earning one's living so as not to be a parasite and loving one's neighbor.
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Every American poet feels that the whole responsibility for contemporary poetry has fallen upon his shoulders, that he is a literary aristocracy of one.
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