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About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters How well they understood Its human position how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

W. H. Auden

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W. H. Auden
Age: 66 †
Born: 1907
Born: February 21
Died: 1973
Died: September 28
Author
Composer
Essayist
Librettist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Place
Understood
Someone
Walking
Wells
Along
Dully
Human
Position
Opening
Humans
Takes
Window
Well
Suffering
Sorrow
Never
Wrong
Masters
Else
Eating

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If age, which is certainly Just as wicked as youth, look any wiser, It is only that youth is still able to believe It will get away with anything, while age Knows only too well that it has got away with nothing.
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Life is a picnic on a precipice.
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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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Marriage is rarely bliss But, surely it would be worse As particles to pelt At thousands of miles per sec About a universe In which a lover's kiss Would either not be felt Or break the loved one's neck.
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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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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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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 troubles of our times is that we are all, I think, precocious as personalities and backward as characters.
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The stars are not wanted now, put out every one Pack up the moon & dismantle the sun.
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Hunger allows no choice.
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A shilling life will give you all the facts.
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History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
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There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem From insignificance.
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What living occasion can, Be just to the absent?
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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.
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Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores.
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Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear what-is-not is the profundity of what-is.
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Be subtle, various, ornamental, clever, And do not listen to those critics ever Whose crude provincial gullets crave in books Plain cooking made still plainer by plain cooks.
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Learn from your dreams what you lack.
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