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Weep for the lives your wishes never led.

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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Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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If there are any souls in hell, it is because that is where they insist on being.
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Look if you like, but you will have to leap.
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And none will hear the postman’s knock Without a quickening of the heart. For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
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It is, for example, axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.
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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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Desire, even in its wildest tantrums, can neither persuade me it is love nor stop me from wishing it were.
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What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?
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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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All wishes, whatever their apparent content, have the same and unvarying meaning: I refuse to be what I am.
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I see little hope for a peaceful world until men are excluded from the realm of foreign policy altogether and all decisions concerning international relations are reserved for women, preferably married ones.
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The truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is.
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All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman.
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Money is the necessity that frees us from necessity.
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Some books are undeservedly forgotten none are undeservedly remembered.
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Each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom.
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Money cannot buy the fuel of love but is excellent kindling.
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The poet who writes free verse is like Robinson Crusoe on his desert island: he must do all his cooking, laundry and darning for himself. In a few exceptional cases, this manly independence produces something original and impressive, but more often the result is squalor - dirty sheets on the unmade bed and empty bottles on the unswept floor.
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A man is a form of life that dreams in order to act and acts in order to dream.
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God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.
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In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start.
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