"A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become."

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More quotes from: W. H. Auden

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• "A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects. "
• "A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. "
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• "A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us. "
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• "All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation. "
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• "Art is born of humiliation. "
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• "Before people complain of the obscurity of modern poetry, they should first examine their consciences ..."
• "Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their triviality. "
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• "Composing mortals with immortal fire. "
• "Death is the sound of distant thunder at a picnic. "
• "Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own ..."
• "Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud. "
• "For who can bear to feel himself forgotten? "
• "Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as ..."
• "God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich. "
• "Health is the state about which medicine has nothing to say: Sanctity is the state ..."
• "I don't get acting jobs because of my looks. "

• "I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river ..."
• "If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I'd pay for riding lessons ..."
• "In a world of prayer, we are all equal in the sense that each of ..."
• "In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be ..."
• "It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, ..."
• "It is... axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than ..."
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• "It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money ..."
• "It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too ..."
• "Learn from your dreams what you lack. "
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• "May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God ..."
• "Murder is commoner among cooks than among members of any other profession. "
• "Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has ..."
• "Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell. "
• "Music is the best means we have of digesting time. "
• "My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain. "
• "No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are ..."
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• "No hero is mortal till he dies. "
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• "Now is the age of anxiety. "

• "One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell. "
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• "Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into ..."
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• "The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind. "
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• "When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate ..."
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