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Storytelling Quotes by W.H. Auden

2 Storytelling quotes by W.H. Auden

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“A fairy tale...on the other hand, demands of the reader total surrender; so long as he is in its world, there must be for him no other.”

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“Lovers of small numbers go benignly potty, Believe all tales are thirteen chapters long, Have animal doubles, carry pentagrams, Are Millerites, Baconians, Flat-Earth-Men. Lovers of big numbers go horribly mad, would have the Swiss abolished, all of us Well-purged, somatotyped,…

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“Part came from Lane, and part from D.H. Lawrence; Gide, though I didn't know it then, gave part. They taught me to express my…

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“As his wife, Emilia must know Iago better than anybody else. She does not know, any more than the others, that he is malevolent, but she does know that her husband is addicted to practical jokes. What Shakespeare gives us in Iago is a portrait of a practical joker of a peculiarly appalling kind, and perhaps the best way of…

“A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we realize that there are different kinds of pleasure, some of which cannot be enjoyed simultaneously, but we need help from others in defining them. Whether it be a matter of…

“No poet or novelist wishes he was the only one who ever lived, but most of them wish they were the only one alive,…

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“Human "nature" is a nature continually in quest of itself, obliged at every moment to transcend what it was a moment before.”

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“Cassio is a ladies’ man, that is to say, a man who feels most at home in feminine company where his looks and good manners make him popular, but is ill at ease in the company of his own sex because he is unsure of his own masculinity. […] Cassio is a ladies’ man, not a seducer. With women of…

“Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm; Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave…

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“In any first-class work of art, you can find passages that in themselves are extremely boring, but try to cut them out, as they…

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“Healing is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.”

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“For a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its readers, a…

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“Sorry, my dear, one mustn't be bohemian!”

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“Our hunting fathers told the story Of the sadness of the creatures, Pitied the limits and the lack Set in their finished features; Saw…

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