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Life is a picnic on a precipice.

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
Precipice
Life
Picnic
Picnics

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Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.
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There's always another story. There's more than meets the eye.
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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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A poor American feels guilty at being poor, but less guilty than an American rentier who has inherited wealth but is doing nothingto increase it what can the latter do but take to drink and psychoanalysis?
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Private faces in public places Are wiser and nicer Than public faces in private places.
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Recipe for the upbringing of a poet: 'As much neurosis as the child can bear.
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Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic.
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All pity is self-pity.
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There is a great deal of difference in believing something still, and believing it again.
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What is a Professor of Poetry? How can poetry be professed?
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Weep for the lives your wishes never led.
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Christmas and Easter can be subjects for poetry, but Good Friday, like Auschwitz, cannot. The reality is so horrible it is not surprising that people should have found it a stumbling block to faith.
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By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
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The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.
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One can only blaspheme if one believes.
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