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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
Human
Position
Opening
Humans
Takes
Window
Well
Suffering
Sorrow
Never
Wrong
Masters
Else
Eating
Place
Understood
Someone
Walking
Wells
Along
Dully

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In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.
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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.
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the child unlucky in his little State, Some hearth where freedom is excluded, A hive whose honey is fear and worry, Feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape
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There is a great deal of difference in believing something still, and believing it again.
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Few can remember clearly when innocence came to a sudden end, the moment at which we ask for the first time: Am I loved?
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If we really want to live, we'd better start at once to try.
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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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Of course, Behaviourism 'works'. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviourist, a few drugs, and simple electrical appliances, and in six months I will have him reciting the Athanasian Creed in public.
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Shall memory restore The steps and the shore, The face and the meeting place.
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To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.
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The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.
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A tremendous number of people in America work very hard at something that bores them. Even a rich man thinks he has to go down to the office everyday. Not because he likes it but because he can't think of anything else to do.
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Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.
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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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I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.
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Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.
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Cats can be very funny, and have the oddest ways of showing they're glad to see you.
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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 is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police We must love one another or die.
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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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