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"Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self."
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"There is an illusion about America, a myth about America to which we are clinging which has nothing to do with the lives we lead and I don't believe that anybody in this country who has really thought about it or really almost anybody who has been brought up against it--and almost all of us have one way or another--this collision between one's image of oneself and what one actually is is always very painful and there are two things you can do about it, you can meet the collision head-on and try and become what you really are or you can retreat and try to remain what you thought you were, which is a fantasy, in which you will certainly perish."
"This has to be the most self-centered thing I've ever said, but no, I think you just wanted to vex me."
"I put myself and all the members of Congress in the same boat of things that could have been done better."
"Your mind is your world. Your heart is your nature. Your soul is your universe. Your life is your creation."
"Would the child you were yesterday admire the person you are today? If not, adjust for desired results."
"I am blind to the very things that make for our own peace."
"I have enjoyed my company so fondly, I may not feel alone when I am lonely."
"When our thoughts are unsettled and our inner world is in a muddle, we may sharpen our wits and try to recognize the invisible edges of our fractured stance. If we seek to figure out, what our life story is all about, we may be able to put the missing pieces in place and identify what is driving us, what we are actually up to and why we are running like mad dogs, sometimes. ['On a doggy day']"
"If you say something and reject any criticism, then your words truly meant to advise yourself."
"I wanted to laugh. Or maybe get mad. Or maybe shrug at how strange everyone was, especially me."
Explore more quotes by W. H. Auden
"In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them."
"The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet developed a significant profile of their own."
"I am sure it is everyone's experience, as it has been mine, that any discovery we make about ourselves or the meaning of life is never, like a scientific discovery, a coming upon something entirely new and unsuspected; it is rather, the coming to conscious recognition of something, which we really knew all the time but, because we were unwilling to formulate it correctly, we did not hitherto know we knew."
"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."
"My second thoughts condemnAnd wonder how I dareTo look you in the eye.What right have I to swearEven at one a.m.To love you till I die?Earth meets too many crimesFor fibs to interest her;If I can give my word,Forgiveness can recurAny number of timesIn Time. Which is absurd.Tempus fugit. Quite.So finish up your drink.All flesh is grass. It is. But who on earth can thinkWith heavy heart or lightOf what will come of this?"
"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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