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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
Personal
Stink
Wife
Distinctive
Public
Scent
Children
Crowd
Men
Crowds
Smell
Recognize
Dog
Generalized
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We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.
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To save your world you asked this man to die would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
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The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the teacup opens A lane to the land of the dead.
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Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse.
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To hunt for symbols in a fairy tale is absolutely fatal.
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Life is a picnic on a precipice.
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To ask the hard question is simple.
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Harrow the house of the dead look shining at New styles of architecture, a change of heart.
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Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm.
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A poet's hope: to be, like some valley cheese, local, but prized elsewhere.
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It's better to say, 'I'm suffering,' than to say, 'This landscape is ugly.
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Civilizations should be measured by the degree of diversity attained and the degree of unity retained.
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The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.
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Words have no word for words that are not true.
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In a game, just losing is almost as satisfying as just winning... In life the loser's score is always zero.
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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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Shall memory restore The steps and the shore, The face and the meeting place.
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Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
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Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into thinking that he is choosing to obey his master's commands when, in fact, he is obliged to. Most slaves of habit suffer from this delusion and so do some writers, enslaved by an all too personal style.
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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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