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Quote by W.H. Auden

“America has many faults, one of the worst being that Americans always want answers to everything, and when you tell them there aren't any, are very upset. But when they are in a tough spot they do look forward...”

Quote by W.H. Auden

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W.H. Auden

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“We are now face to face with the truly Ultimate Ambiguity which is the human spirit. This is the most fascinating ambiguity of all: that as each of us grows up, the mark of our maturity is that we accept our mortality; and yet we persist in our search for immortality. We may believe it's all transient, even that it's all over; yet we believe a future. We believe. We emerge from a cinema after three hours of the most abject degeneracy in a film such as ''La Dolce Vita,'' and we emerge on wings, from the sheer creativity of it; we can fly on, to a future. And the same is true after witnessing the hopelessness of ''Godot'' in the theater, or after the aggressive violence of ''The Rite of Spring'' in the concert hall. Or even after listening to the bittersweet young cynicism of an album called ''Revolver,'' we have wings to fly on.”

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Book:The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard
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“In the most unlikely moments, I would catch glimpses of the person I used to be: the child who shrieked with delight as her dress swirled about her like a balloon, the girl who used to see the glass as half full, the young woman who used to laugh at the absurdity of life. All of those previous versions of myself had existed, yet I couldn’t have imagined what the future versions would be like.”

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Book:Rewriting My Happily Ever After: A Memoir of Divorce and Discovery
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“Optimism has always been an undeclared policy of human culture- one that grew out of our animal instincts to survive and reproduce- rather than an articulated body of thought. It is the default condition of our blood and cannot be effectively questioned by our minds or put in grave doubt by our pains. This would explain why at any given time there are more cannibals than philosophical pessimists.”

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Book:The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
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