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What we have not named as a symbol escapes our notice.
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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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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More quotes by W. H. Auden
We till shadowed days are done, We must weep and sing Duty's conscious wrong, The Devil in the clock
W. H. Auden
The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when the evening ends and people pair off, someone is bound to be left in tears.
W. H. Auden
Happy the hare at morning, for she cannot read The hunter's waking thoughts.
W. H. Auden
The element of craftsmanship in poetry is obscured by the fact that all men are taught to speak and most to read and write, while very few men are taught to draw or paint or write music.
W. H. Auden
Water is the soul of the Earth.
W. H. Auden
There has been a vast output of critical studies in contemporary poetry, some of them first rate, but I do not think that , as a rule, a poet should read them.
W. H. Auden
Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.
W. H. Auden
To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.
W. H. Auden
I will love you forever swears the poet. I find this easy to swear too. I will love you at 4:15 pm next Tuesday - Is that still as easy?
W. H. Auden
The surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it.
W. H. Auden
All I have is a voice.
W. H. Auden
You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire.
W. H. Auden
Laziness acknowledges the relation of the present to the past but ignores its relation to the future impatience acknowledge its relation to the future but ignores its relation to the past neither the lazy nor the impatient man, that is, accepts the present instant in its full reality and so cannot love his neighbour completely.
W. H. Auden
Political history is far too criminal to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villians from fiction.
W. H. Auden
Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.
W. H. Auden
Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.
W. H. Auden
If we really want to live, we'd better start at once to try.
W. H. Auden
Every poet has his dream reader: mine keeps a look out for curious prosodic fauna like bacchics and choriambs.
W. H. Auden
Nobody is ever sent to Hell: he or she insists on going there.
W. H. Auden
In the eyes of others a man is a poet if he has written one good poem. In his own he is only a poet at the moment when he is making his last revision to a new poem. The moment before, he was still only a potential poet the moment after, he is a man who has ceased to write poetry, perhaps forever.
W. H. Auden
