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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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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Weep
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Wish
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Never
Life

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Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events!
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I'm always amazed at the American practice of allowing one party to a homosexual act to remain passive--it's so undemocratic. Sexmust be mutual.
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When one looks into the window of a store which sells devotional art objects, one can't help wishing the iconoclasts had won.
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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 theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.
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Long ago the accusations had begun, And suddenly knew by whom it had been judged
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Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise.
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One rational voice is dumb: over a grave The household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved. Sad is Eros, builder of cities, And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.
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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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Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
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We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.
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So long as we think of it objectively, time is Fate or Chance, the factor in our lives for which we are not responsible, and about which we can do nothing but when we begin to think of it subjectively, we feel responsible for our time, and the notion of punctuality arises.
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A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
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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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There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them, ''Did you get an erection?'' If the answer is ''Yes'' from a majority of the twelve, then the book is pornographic.
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In a game, just losing is almost as satisfying as just winning... In life the loser's score is always zero.
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There's always another story. There's more than meets the eye.
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Whatever you do, good or bad, people will always have something negative to say
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I know nothing, except what everyone knows - if there when Grace dances, I should dance.
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See without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking.
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