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Without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.

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
Dead
Possible
Human
Humans
Without
Life
Fully
Communication

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The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.
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Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
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A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.
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It's better to say, 'I'm suffering,' than to say, 'This landscape is ugly.
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I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return.
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How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.
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To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety.
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We till shadowed days are done, We must weep and sing Duty's conscious wrong, The Devil in the clock
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A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
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History marched to the drums of a clear idea...
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There was still gold and silver in the mountains, And hunger was a more immediate sorrow
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The law cannot forgive, for the law has not been wronged, only broken only persons can be wronged. The law can pardon, but it can only pardon what it has the power to punish.
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To hunt for symbols in a fairy tale is absolutely fatal.
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Man is a history-making creature, who can neither repeat his past, nor leave it behind.
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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 think the first prerequisite to civilization is an ability to make polite conversation.
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We were put on this Earth to help others. Why others were put here is beyond me.
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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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History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.
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I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky.
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