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Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance.

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
Struck
Fate
Theory
High
Chance
Demolish
Every
Accurately
Puppets
Irresponsible

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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.
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You will be a poet because you will always be humiliated.
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But once in a while the odd thing happens Once in a while the dream comes true And the whole pattern of life is altered Once in a while, the moon turns blue
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The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.
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A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.
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The relation of faith between subject and object is unique in every case. Hundreds may believe, but each has to believe by himself.
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Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his. If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading.
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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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Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say.
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The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.
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To my generation no other English poet seemed so perfectly to express the sensibility of a male adolescent. If I do not now turn to him very often, I am eternally grateful to him for the joy he gave me in my youth.
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What the poet says has never been said before, but, once he has said it, his readers recognize its validity for themselves.
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Man is a history-making creature, who can neither repeat his past, nor leave it behind.
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The sky is darkening like a stain Something is going to fall like rain And it won't be flowers
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Of course, Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviourist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.
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Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
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Civilizations should be measured by the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained.
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Without Art, we should have no notion of the sacred without Science, we should always worship false gods.
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One of the troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.
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Genealogies are admirable things, provided they do not encourage the curious delusion that some families are older than others.
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