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Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
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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Essayist
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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
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University Teacher
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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
Inviting
Ballet
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Drop
Till
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Pointe
Dance
Rafters
Homecoming
More quotes by W. H. Auden
To be happy means to be free, not from pain or fear, but from care or anxiety.
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
But he would have us most of all remember to be enthusiastic over the night. Not only for the sense of wonder it alone has to offer but also because it needs our love. For with sad eyes its delectable creatures look up and beg us dumbly to ask them to follow. They are exiles who long for a future that lies in our power.
W. H. Auden
Had Greek civilization never existed ... we would never have become fully conscious.
W. H. Auden
Behind the corpse in the reservoir, behind the ghost on the links, Behind the lady who dances and the man who madly drinks, Under the look of fatigue, the attack of migraine and the sigh There is always another story, there is more than meets the eye.
W. H. Auden
The way to read a fairy tale is to throw yourself in.
W. H. Auden
Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character it is just as credible that a stupid person should sing beautifully as that a clever person should do so.
W. H. Auden
Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
W. H. Auden
For time is inches And the heart's changes, Where ghost has haunted Lost and wanted.
W. H. Auden
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.
W. H. Auden
Attacking bad books is not only a waste of time but also bad for the character. If I find a book really bad, the only interest I can derive from writing about it has to come from myself, from such display of intelligence, wit and malice as I can contrive. One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
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
The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.
W. H. Auden
It is, for example, axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people because, when we are insensitive in our dealings with others, we cannot be aware of it at the time: conscious insensitivity is a self-contradiction.
W. H. Auden
Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
W. H. Auden
Thou shalt not answer questionnaires Or quizzes upon world affairs, Nor with compliance Take any test. Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit A social science.
W. H. Auden
Let all your thinks be thanks.
W. H. Auden
The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.
W. H. Auden
Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.
W. H. Auden
Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle.
W. H. Auden
