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A man has his distinctive personal scent which his wife, his children and his dog can recognize. A crowd has a generalized stink. The public is odorless.
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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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Smell
Recognize
Dog
Generalized
Personal
Stink
Wife
Distinctive
Public
Scent
Children
Crowd
Men
Crowds
More quotes by W. H. Auden
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.
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All I have is a voice.
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Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
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Now is the age of anxiety.
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Does God judge us by appearances? I Suspect that He does.
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In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune elsewhere. In America, on the other hand, to move on and make a fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reaction to dissatisfaction and failure.
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Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.
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Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.
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A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
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Words are for those with promises to keep.
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The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
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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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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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Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
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Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
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The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.
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No hero is mortal till he dies.
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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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Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.
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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.
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