"Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods."

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More quotes from: W. H. Auden

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• "A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us. "
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• "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. "
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• "Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud. "
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• "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 ..."
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• "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, ..."
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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. "
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• "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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• "Now is the age of anxiety. "

• "One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell. "
• "Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out ..."
• "Slavery is so intolerable a condition that the slave can hardly escape deluding himself into ..."
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• "When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate ..."
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