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 are in an abridged edition, and you lose the life of the work. Don't think that art that is alive can remain on the same level of interest throughout – and the same is true of life. W.h. Auden
About This Quote

If you think of a work of art as a living thing, you will appreciate the importance of maintaining the integrity and tone of the work, even when it seems unimportant to you at that time. When you cut out parts of a work of art, you can read it for yourself, but you’re not doing justice to the work itself. You don’t get the full value, because you’re not getting all of the information that makes the whole more interesting than its parts.

Source: Lectures On Shakespeare

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More Quotes By W.h. Auden
  1. We must love one another or die

  2. He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

  3. If equal affection cannot be, Let the more loving one be me.

  4. 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...

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