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A writer is a maker, not a man of action: his private life is of no concern to anybody but himself, his family and his friends.

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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More quotes by W. H. Auden

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One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.
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Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
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Hunger allows no choice.
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The sky is darkening like a stain Something is going to fall like rain And it won't be flowers
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No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.
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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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Adjectives are the potbelly of poetry.
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God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
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I don't think the mystical experience can be verbalized. When the ego disappears, so does power over language.
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Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.
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It's usually the stupid people that develop long illnesses. You need more than indolence and selfishness, you need endurance to make a good patient.
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With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse
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Those who will not reason, perish in the act. Those who will not act, perish for that reason.
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He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
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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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A dead man who never caused others to die seldom rates a statue.
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A poet must never make a statement simply because it is sounds poetically exciting he must also believe it to be true.
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A poem is a verbal artifact which must be as skillfully and solidly constructed as a table or a motorcycle.
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Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
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If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.
W. H. Auden