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See without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking.

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
Philosophical
Breathe
Asking
Listening
Hear
Looking
Without

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Criticism should be a casual conversation.
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A writer is a maker, not a man of action: his private life is of no concern to anybody but himself, his family and his friends.
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Beauty, midnight, vision dies: Let the winds of dawn that blow Softly round your dreaming head Such a day of welcome show Eye and knocking heart may bless, Find our mortal world enough Noons of dryness find you fed By the involuntary powers, Nights of insult let you pass Watched by every human love.
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Now is the age of anxiety.
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If equal affection cannot be, let the more loving be me.
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Few can remember clearly when innocence came to a sudden end, the moment at which we ask for the first time: Am I loved?
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Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.
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One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.
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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.
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Out on the lawn I lie in bed, Vega conspicuous overhead.
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You know there are no secrets in America. It's quite different in England, where people think of a secret as a shared relation between two people.
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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.
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We do not change as we grow up. The difference between the child and the adult is that the former doesn't know who he is and the latter does.
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As a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language from corruption.
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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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Words have no word for words that are not true.
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My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
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Over the tea-cups and in the square the tongue has its desire Still waters run deep, my dear, there's never smoke without fire.
W. H. Auden
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I see little hope for a peaceful world until men are excluded from the realm of foreign policy altogether and all decisions concerning international relations are reserved for women, preferably married ones.
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The parlour cars and Pullmans are packed also with scented assassins, salad-eaters who murder on milk.
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