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Our claim to our own bodies and our world is our catastrophe.

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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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
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Jórvík
Wystan Hugh Auden
Wystan Auden
Wystan H Auden
W. H. Wystan Hugh Auden
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Nobody is ever sent to Hell: he or she insists on going there.
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The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.
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Poetry is the only art people haven't learned to consume like soup.
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There was still gold and silver in the mountains, And hunger was a more immediate sorrow
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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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I know nothing, except what everyone knows - if there when Grace dances, I should dance.
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I smell blood and an era of prominent madmen.
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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.
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A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.
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Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good.
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There are three cardinal rules - don't take somebody else's boyfriend unless you've been specifically invited to do so, don't take a drink without being asked, and keep a scrupulous accounting in financial matters.
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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.
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The trees encountered on a country stroll Reveal a lot about that country's soul ... A culture is no better than its woods.
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Human language is mythological and metaphorical by nature.
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Weep for the lives your wishes never led.
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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.
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The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as is apt to happen when these are abandoned, of race, but of age.
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In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy To-morrow or today.
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