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Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye.

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
Every
Intellectual
Seas
Loss
Disgrace
Face
Frozen
Lying
Locked
Faces
Staring
Eye
Pity
Human
Sadness
Humans
Sea
Stares

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My poetry doesn't change from place to place - it changes with the years. It's very important to be one's age. You get ideas you have to turn down - 'I'm sorry, no longer' 'I'm sorry, not yet.
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Get up very early and get going at once. In fact, work first and wash afterwards.
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Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art.
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Few can remember clearly when innocence came to a sudden end, the moment at which we ask for the first time: Am I loved?
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It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself doing it. In England, one feels all the social restraints holding one back. But here, anything can happen.
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The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.
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The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own.
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Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
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No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
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Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.
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There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, Irregular verbs to learn, the Time Being to redeem From insignificance.
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Though one cannot always Remember exactly why one has been happy, There is no forgetting that one was.
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If age, which is certainly Just as wicked as youth, look any wiser, It is only that youth is still able to believe It will get away with anything, while age Knows only too well that it has got away with nothing.
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We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.
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It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.
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Every high C accurately struck demolishes the theory that we are the irresponsible puppets of fate or chance.
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The only reason the Protestants and Catholics have given up the idea of universal domination is because they've realised they can't get away with it.
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What answer to the meaning of existence should one require beyond the right to exercise one's gifts?
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The definition of prayer is paying careful and concentrated attention to something other than your own constructions.
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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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