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My poetry doesn't change from place to place - it changes with the years. It's very important to be one's age. You get ideas you have to turn down - 'I'm sorry, no longer' 'I'm sorry, not yet.

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

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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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Words are for those with promises to keep.
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You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-obje ct look.
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And make us as Newton was, who in his garden watching The apple falling towards England, became aware Between himself and her of an eternal tie.
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The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor, simply because major poets write a lot.
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Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, he asserts and implicit in his assertion is a conviction that he is wiser and more intelligent than his readers.
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Blessed be all metrical rules that forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free us from the fetters of Self.
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Courses in prosody, rhetoric and comparative philology would be required of all students, and every student would have to select three courses out of courses in mathematics, natural history, geology, meteorology, archaeology, mythology, liturgics, cooking.
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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.
W. H. Auden
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A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good many take their images precooked out of a can and swallow them down whole, absent-mindedly and with little relish.
W. H. Auden
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The definition of prayer is paying careful and concentrated attention to something other than your own constructions.
W. H. Auden
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But he would have us most of all remember to be enthusiastic over the night. Not only for the sense of wonder it alone has to offer but also because it needs our love. For with sad eyes its delectable creatures look up and beg us dumbly to ask them to follow. They are exiles who long for a future that lies in our power.
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There are not many English novels which deserve to be called great: Parade's End is one of them.
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It's frightfully important for a writer to be his age, not to be younger or older than he is. One might ask, What should I write at the age of sixty-four, but never, What should I write in 1940.
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The camera may do justice to laughter, but must degrade sorrow.
W. H. Auden
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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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Time will say nothing but I told you so, Time only knows the price we have to pay If I could tell you I would let you know.
W. H. Auden
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The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.
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I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.
W. H. Auden
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Cathedrals, luxury liners laden with souls, Holding to the east their hulls of stone.
W. H. Auden