The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.


W.H. Auden

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Sonnet LXXXI

And now you're mine. Rest with your dream in my dream.
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Don’t pack out
______________

To some people, you make life bright
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Now is the only time we have, and the only time that we have any control over.
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Don't ever give up.
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Look for the stars, you'll say that there are none;
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love builds up the broken wall
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love keeps the stars in the ...
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I love to watch the fine mist of the night come on,
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Time is drowning,
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On the day I die, when I'm being carried
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Journey’s end

In western lands beneath the Sun
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Journey to the end of day,
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Now is the winter of our discontent
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Farewell sweet earth and northern sky,
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It doesn't bother me
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The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all ...
W.H. AUDEN
The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
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As...
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Who says you cannot hold the moon in your hand?

Tonight when the stars come out and the m...
VERA NAZARIAN
The poet W.H. Auden wrote that people come in two varieties: Utopians, who imagine the perfect world...
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The stars are brilliant at this time of night
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I am starting to accept
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HEARTWORK

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I sang of leaves, of leaves of gold, and leaves of gold there grew:
Of wind I sang, a wind ther...
J.R.R. TOLKIEN
Nothing belongs to itself anymore.
These trees are yours because you once looked at them.
KAMAND KOJOURI
I’m in no hurry: the sun and the moon aren’t, either.
Nobody goes faster than the legs they...
ALBERTO CAEIRO
Now is the winter of our discontent
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WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
I look up. And I am surrounded by the universe.

silence

and stars

A...
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And who do you
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God spreads the heavens above us like great wings
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The girl looks out the window, watching the gentle, familiar blue sky fade into darkness. The stars ...
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The human heart can go to the lengths of God.
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Hello, sun in my face.

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...
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moon dust in your lungs
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you are a child of the cosmos
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Oppression

Now dreams
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Nor songs
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ENDURANCE

I don't know you,
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...
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The crown o' the earth doth melt. My lord!
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The sold...
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It was because they were two parts of a whole. He did not belong to her. And she did not belong to h...
RENEE AHDIEH
Cease with the displays of false modesty. The entire palace knows about it."
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Do you know why I adore roses?" Shahrzad untied the knot of his tikka sash with deliberate slowness....
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Where were you?" Shahrzad tried to control the tremor in her voice.
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As always. As ever. As a rose to the sun.
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The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.

When I'm insp...
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Roads Go Ever On

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By caves wher...
J.R.R. TOLKIEN
One day the sun will shine brighter than ever,
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Before Jerusalem

Now they've come before Jerusalem.
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Our ancestors worshipped the Sun, and they were not that foolish.
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but nothing I ever gave was good for you;
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they cram a...
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ANY FOOL CAN GET INTO AN OCEAN
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Avoid the temptation to force a moment so you won’t miss the one with your name on it.
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So are we lost or do we know
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The present moment is always the most important. The present moment is the only one.
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The present moment is always the most important.
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Wake up naked drinking coffee
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DAVE MATTHEWS
Yet nothing can to nothing fall,
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JOHN DONNE
If you’ve managed to do one good thing,
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The real world out there isn't nearly as nice as some people prefer it to be, so don't swallow every...
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There is no worse discriminator than envy. No worse traitor than envy. Even those who are seemingly ...
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The warm sound of her laughter stole through Khalid's skin, heating the coldest reaches of his soul.
RENEE AHDIEH
Your flag and my flag,
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In your land and my land
And half a wo...
WILBUR D. NESBIT
But what would have been the good?"
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Tis the witching hour of night,
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Though leaves are many, the root is one,
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A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
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If equal affection cannot be,
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To make one, there must be two.
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The slogan of Hell: Eat or be eaten. The slogan of Heaven: Eat and be eaten.
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Base words are uttered only by the base
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W.H. AUDEN
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
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No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the o...
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Now shall I walk or shall I ride?
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You have to see the sex act comically, as a child.
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It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say,...
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Choice of attention - to pay attention to this and ignore that - is to the inner life ...
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Dogmatic theological statements are neither logical propositions nor poetic utterances. They are sha...
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There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them...
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The belief that politics can be scientific must inevitably produce tyrannies. Politics cannot be a s...
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My deepest feeling about politicians is that they are dangerous lunatics to be avoided when possible...
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A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
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It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one's nose, a good deal of it to know in which...
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Anyone who has a child today should train him to be either a physicist or a ballet dancer. Then he'l...
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Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
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A false enchantment can all too easily last a lifetime.
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The center that I cannot find is known to my unconscious mind.
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Left to itself the masculine imagination has very little appreciation for the here and now; it prefe...
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How happy the lot of the mathematician! He is judged solely by his peers, and the standard is so hig...
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Of course, behaviorism works. So does torture. Give me a no-nonsense, down-to-earth behaviorist, a f...
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Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.
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I and the public know
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To the man-in-the-street, who, I'm sorry to say, is a keen observer of life. The word Intellectual s...
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Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.
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No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
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If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willful...
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The only way to spend New Year's Eve is either quietly with friends or in a brothel. Otherwise when ...
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A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
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Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of...
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It's frightening how easy it is to commit murder in America. Just a drink too much. I can see myself...
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A doctor, like anyone else who has to deal with human beings, each of them unique, cannot be a scien...
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Between friends differences in taste or opinion are irritating in direct proportion to their trivial...
W. H. AUDEN
God is Love, we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of ho...
W. H. AUDEN
Geniuses are the luckiest of mortals because what they must do is the same as what they most want to...
W. H. AUDEN
No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.
W. H. AUDEN
Funeral Blues


W. H. AUDEN
Literary confessors are contemptible, like beggars who exhibit their sores for money, but not so con...
W. H. AUDEN
One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.
W. H. AUDEN
Healing, Papa would tell me, is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.
W. H. AUDEN
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can bear to ...
W. H. AUDEN
Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, th...
W. H. AUDEN
All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular c...
W. H. AUDEN
It is... axiomatic that we should all think of ourselves as being more sensitive than other people b...
W. H. AUDEN
Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud.
W. H. AUDEN
May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, consideri...
W. H. AUDEN
My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.
W. H. AUDEN
Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would cal...
W. H. AUDEN
Aphorisms are essentially an aristocratic genre of writing. The aphorist does not argue or explain, ...
W. H. AUDEN
The countenances of children, like those of animals, are masks, not faces, for they have not yet dev...
W. H. AUDEN
Nobody knows what the cause is, though some pretend they do; it like some hidden assassin waiting to...
W. H. AUDEN
Cancer is a curious thing...
Nobody knows what the cause is,
Though some pretend they do;
I...
W. H. AUDEN
I cannot accept the doctrine that in poetry there is a suspension of belief. A poet must never make ...
W. H. AUDEN
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his...
W. H. AUDEN
Poetry makes nothing happen. It survives in the valley of its saying.
W. H. AUDEN
Rhymes, meters, stanza forms, etc., are like servants. If the master is fair enough to win their aff...
W. H. AUDEN
As a poet there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one's language against corruption....
W. H. AUDEN
You must go to bed with friends or whores, where money makes up the difference in beauty or desire.
W. H. AUDEN
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a m...
W. H. AUDEN
A daydream is a meal at which images are eaten. Some of us are gourmets, some gourmands, and a good ...
W. H. AUDEN
But in seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided.
A continent for better or worse divided. W. H. AUDEN
If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all ...
W. H. AUDEN
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they s...
W. H. AUDEN
No poet or novelist wishes he were the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the ...
W. H. AUDEN
The Americans are violently oral. That's why in America the mother is all-important and the father h...
W. H. AUDEN
God bless the USA, so large, so friendly, and so rich.
W. H. AUDEN
The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in ...
W. H. AUDEN
The critical opinions of a writer should always be taken with a large grain of salt. For the most pa...
W. H. AUDEN
Criticism should be a casual conversation.
W. H. AUDEN
All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will...
W. H. AUDEN
Now is the age of anxiety.
W. H. AUDEN
The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar, and is shocked by the unexpected: the eye, on the ot...
W. H. AUDEN
A professor is one who talks in someone else's sleep.
W H AUDEN
It takes little talent to see clearly what lies under one's nose, a good deal of it to know in whi...
W. H. AUDEN
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Pa...
W. H. AUDEN
One cannot review a bad book without showing off.
W. H. AUDEN
A poet's hope: to be,
like some valley cheese,
local, but prized elsewhere.
W. H. AUDEN
All sins tend to be addictive, and the terminal point of addiction is damnation.
W. H. AUDEN
I'll love you, dear, I'll love you till China and Africa meet and the river jumps over the m...
W. H. AUDEN
We all have these places where shy humiliations gambol on sunny afternoons.
W. H. AUDEN
We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.
W. H. AUDEN
A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.
W. H. AUDEN
The class distinctions proper to a democratic society are not those of rank or money, still less, as...
W. H. AUDEN
History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology ...
W. H. AUDEN
When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into ...
W. H. AUDEN
He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, ...
W. H. AUDEN
Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Pa...
W. H. AUDEN
To save your world you asked this man to die;
Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
W. H. AUDEN
No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.
W. H. AUDEN
False enchantment can last a lifetime.
W. H. AUDEN
Evil is unspectacular and always human,
And shares our bed and eats at our own table.
W. H. AUDEN
When the Sex War ended with the slaughter of the Grandmothers, / They found a bachelor's baby suffoc...
W. H. AUDEN