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The eye likes novelty, but the ear craves familiarity.

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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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
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To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual suggests straight away. A man who's untrue to his wife.
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An honest self-portrait is extremely rare because a man who has reached the degree of self-consciousness presupposed by the desire to paint his own portrait has almost always also developed an ego-consciousness which paints himself painting himself, and introduces artificial highlights and dramatic shadows.
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Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'll escape.
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Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity.
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Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon world affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit A social science.
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Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance.
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A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.
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Drama began as the act of a whole community. Ideally, there would be no speculators. In practice, every member of the audience should feel like an understudy.
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What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
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The poet who writes free verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.
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Though one cannot always Remember exactly why one has been happy, There is no forgetting that one was.
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Sexual fidelity is more important in a homosexual relationship than in any other. In other relationships there are a variety of ties. But here, fidelity is the only bond.
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An unmanly sort of man whose love life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.
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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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Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.
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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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Now is the age of anxiety.
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Had Greek civilization never existed ... we would never have become fully conscious.
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A craftsman knows in advance what the finished result will be, while the artist knows only what it will be when he has finished it.
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