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Hunger allows no choice.

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
Choices
Allows
Hunger
Choice

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We honor founders of these starving cities, Whose honor is the image of our sorrow.
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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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O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you've missed.
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Caesar's double-bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes i do not like my work On a pink official form.
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If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
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One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
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There are three cardinal rules - don't take somebody else's boyfriend unless you've been specifically invited to do so, don't take a drink without being asked, and keep a scrupulous accounting in financial matters.
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One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
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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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Love each other or perish.
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The parlour cars and Pullmans are packed also with scented assassins, salad-eaters who murder on milk.
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The Ogre does what ogres can, Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach, The Ogre cannot master Speech: About a subjugated plain, Among its desperate and slain, The Ogre stalks with hands on hips, While drivel gushes from his lips.
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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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Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases, a man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences, whatever they may be.
W. H. Auden
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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 think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.
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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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Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.
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When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,' he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu.
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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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