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America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an élite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment.
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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More quotes by W. H. Auden
The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
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Encased in talent like a uniform, The rank of every poet is well known They can amaze us like a thunderstorm, Or die so young, or live for years alone.
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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?
W. H. Auden
Hunger allows no choice.
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No being can make another one happy.
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the child unlucky in his little State, Some hearth where freedom is excluded, A hive whose honey is fear and worry, Feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape
W. H. Auden
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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To choose what is difficult all one's days, as if it were easy, that is faith
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Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
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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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When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.
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To hunt for symbols in a fairy tale is absolutely fatal.
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About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters.
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One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
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You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.
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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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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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Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance.
W. H. Auden
Though one cannot always Remember exactly why one has been happy, There is no forgetting that one was.
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The parlour cars and Pullmans are packed also with scented assassins, salad-eaters who murder on milk.
W. H. Auden
