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God may reduce you on Judgment Day to tears of shame, reciting by heart the poems you would have written, had your life been good.

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
Life
Shame
Judgment
Tears
Written
May
Heart
Reciting
Good
Reduce
Would
Poems

More quotes by W. H. Auden

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Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality.
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A shilling life will give you all the facts.
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Young people, who are still uncertain of their identity, often try on a succession of masks in the hope of finding the one which suits them - the one, in fact, which is not a mask.
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Caesar's double-bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes i do not like my work On a pink official form.
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The Ogre does what ogres can, Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach, The Ogre cannot master Speech: About a subjugated plain, Among its desperate and slain, The Ogre stalks with hands on hips, While drivel gushes from his lips.
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Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
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All that we are not stares back at what we are.
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How should we like it were stars to burn With a passion for us we could not return? If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.
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Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe.
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All pity is self-pity.
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Organic growth is a cyclical process it is just as true to say that the oak is a potential acorn as it is to say the acorn is a potential oak. But the process of writing a poem, of making any art object, is not cyclical but a motion in one direction toward a definite end.
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All the rest is silence On the other side of the wall, And the silence ripeness, And the ripeness all.
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Nobody is ever sent to Hell: he or she insists on going there.
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What living occasion can, Be just to the absent?
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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 truly tragic kind of suffering is the kind produced and defiantly insisted upon by the hero himself so that, instead of making him better, it makes him worse and when he dies he is not reconciled to the law but defiant, that is, damned. Lear is not a tragic hero, Othello is.
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Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
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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
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What we have not named as a symbol escapes our notice.
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You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation, you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-obje ct look.
W. H. Auden