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All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: I refuse to be what I am.

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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Literary Critic
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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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Unvarying

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Good can imagine Evil but Evil cannot imagine Good.
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Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.
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Poetry is the only art people haven't learned to consume like soup.
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Organic growth is a cyclical process it is just as true to say that the oak is a potential acorn as it is to say the acorn is a potential oak. But the process of writing a poem, of making any art object, is not cyclical but a motion in one direction toward a definite end.
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You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.
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Acts of injustice done Between the setting and the rising sun In history lie like bones, each one.
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A person incapable of imaging another world than given to him by his senses would be subhuman, and a person who identifies his imaginary world with the world of sensory fact has become insane.
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Nobody is ever sent to Hell: he or she insists on going there.
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When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.
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Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession.
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Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return.
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The lights must never go out, The music must always play
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The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.
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What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
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The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the teacup opens A lane to the land of the dead.
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It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
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