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Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three. -- Philip Larkin
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I was sleeping, and you woke me
To walk on the chilled shore
Of a night with no memory,
Till your voice forsook my ear
Till your two hands withdrew
And I was empty of tears,
On the edge of a bricked and streeted sea
And a cold hill of stars. -- Philip Larkin
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Why can't one stop being a son without becoming a father? -- Philip Larkin
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Walk with the dead
For fear of death. -- Philip Larkin
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Selflessness is like waiting in a hospital
In a badly-fitting suit on a cold wet morning.
Selfishness is like listening to good jazz
With drinks for further orders and a huge fire. -- Philip Larkin
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One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the same day as we do ourselves. -- Philip Larkin
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My mother, who hates thunderstorms,
Holds up each summer day and shakes
It out suspiciously, lest swarms
Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there ... -- Philip Larkin
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Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself -- Philip Larkin
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Something, like nothing, happens anywhere. -- Philip Larkin
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Life and literature is a question of what one thrills to, and further than that no man shall ever go without putting his foot in a turd. -- Philip Larkin
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I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day. -- Philip Larkin
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I listen to money singing, it's like looking down from long French windows at a provincial town. The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad in the evening sun. It is intensely sad ... -- Philip Larkin
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And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died. -- Philip Larkin
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I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not. -- Philip Larkin
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It's easy to write when you've nothing to write about
(That is, when you are young) ... -- Philip Larkin
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Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am. -- Philip Larkin
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I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt. -- Philip Larkin
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A good meal can somewhat repair / The eatings of slight love -- Philip Larkin
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How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really. -- Philip Larkin
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Work is a kind of vacuum, an emptiness, where I just switch off everything except the scant intelligence necessary to keep me going. God, the people are awful - great carved monstrosities from the sponge-stone of secondratedness. Hideous. -- Philip Larkin
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Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off? Six days of the week it soils With its sickening poison
Just for paying a few bills! That's out of proportion. -- Philip Larkin
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If I looked into your face / expecting a word or a laugh on the old conditions, / it would not be a friend who met my eye -- Philip Larkin
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Many famous feet have trod
Sublunary paths, and famous hands have weighed
The strength they have against the strength they need;
And famous lips interrogated God
Concerning franchise in eternity ... -- Philip Larkin
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In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps,
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures. -- Philip Larkin
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I'd like to think ... that people in pubs would talk about my poems -- Philip Larkin
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Earth never grieves, I thought, walking across the park, watching seagulls cruising greedily above the ground looking for heaven knows what. Don't you think it's a good line? A very good line -- Philip Larkin
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I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It's very strange how often strong feelings don't seem to carry any message of action. -- Philip Larkin
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I am beginning to think of the human imagination as a fruit machine on which victories are rare and separated by much vain expense, and represent a rare alignment of mental and spiritual qualities that normally are quite at odds. -- Philip Larkin
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I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others & myself ... -- Philip Larkin
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Life is first boredom, then fear, -- Philip Larkin
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Only the young can be alone freely. The time is shorter now for company, And sitting by a lamp more often brings Not peace, but other things. -- Philip Larkin
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Parents fuck you up. They don't mean to but they do. -- Philip Larkin
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It will be worth it, if in the end I manage
To blank out whatever it is that is doing the damage.
Then there will be nothing I know.
My mind will fold into itself, like fields, like snow. -- Philip Larkin
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I think a young poet, or an old poet, for that matter, should try to produce something that pleases himself personally, not only when he's written it but a couple of weeks later. Then he should see if it pleases anyone else, by sending it to the kind of magazine he likes reading. -- Philip Larkin
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But O, Photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing! -- Philip Larkin
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My age fallen away like white swaddling
Floats in the middle distance, becomes
An inhabited cloud. -- Philip Larkin
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He [Llewelyn Powys] has always in mind the great touchstone Death & consequently life is always judged as how far it fits us, or compensates us, for ultimately dying. -- Philip Larkin
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No one can tear your thread out of himself.
No one can tie you down or set you free. -- Philip Larkin
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And I am sick for want of sleep;
So sick, that I can half-believe
The soundless river pouring from the cave
Is neither strong nor deep;
Only an image fancied in conceit. -- Philip Larkin
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Everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. -- Philip Larkin
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They say eyes clear with age. -- Philip Larkin
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To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted -- Philip Larkin
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A writer once said to me, If you ever go to America, go either to the East Coast or the West Coast: The rest is a desert full of bigots. That's what I think I'd like ... a version of pastoral. -- Philip Larkin
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They mess you up, your Mom and Dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had. And add some extra, just for you -- Philip Larkin
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The difficult part of love
Is being selfish enough ... -- Philip Larkin
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Poetry is emotional in nature and theatrical in operation. -- Philip Larkin
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If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.' -- Philip Larkin
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You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso. -- Philip Larkin
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Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous,
Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water,
Is earth's most multiple, excited daughter;
And those she has least use for see her best,
Their paths grown craven and circuitous,
Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest. -- Philip Larkin
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Ought we to smile / Perhaps make friends? No: in the race for seats / You're best alone. Friendship is not worth while. -- Philip Larkin
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Any memory for the most part depending on chance. -- Philip Larkin
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A good poem about failure is a success. -- Philip Larkin
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The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke ...
Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can't come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere. -- Philip Larkin
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Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless. -- Philip Larkin
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It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind. -- Philip Larkin
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Things are tougher than we are, just
As earth will always respond
However we mess it about ... -- Philip Larkin
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Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession. -- Philip Larkin
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Much better stay in company!
To love you must have someone else,
Giving requires a legatee,
Good neighbours need whole parishfuls
Of folk to do it on - in short,
Our virtues are all social; if,
Deprived of solitude, you chafe,
It's clear you're not the virtuous sort. -- Philip Larkin
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Here is unfenced existence -- Philip Larkin
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Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's, and everybody else can fuck off. -- Philip Larkin
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Mother's electric blanket broke, & I have 'mended' it, so she may be practising suttee involuntarily before long. -- Philip Larkin
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They both rise / Make for the Coke dispenser. 'What's he like? / Christ, I just told you. -- Philip Larkin
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I like spaghetti because you don't have to take your eyes off the book to pick about among it, it's all the same. -- Philip Larkin
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I suppose if one lives to be old, one's entire waking life will be spent turning on the spit of recollection over the fires of mingled shame, pain or remorse. Cheerful prospect! -- Philip Larkin
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I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife. -- Philip Larkin
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Parting is a training streamer,Lingering like leaves in autumn ... -- Philip Larkin
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To put one brick upon another,
Add a third, and then a fourth,
Leaves no time to wonder whether
What you do has any worth. -- Philip Larkin
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Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything - these are sort of 'ideal' poems that one feels ought to be written, but don't because (I fancy) they lack the vital spark of self-interest. A 'real' poem is a pleasure to write. -- Philip Larkin
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I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve. -- Philip Larkin
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In times when nothing stood / but worsened, or grew strange / there was one constant good: / she did not change. -- Philip Larkin
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When I get sent manuscripts from aspiring poets, I do one of two things: if there is no stamped self-addressed envelope, I throw it into the bin.-If there is, I write and tell them to f**k off. -- Philip Larkin
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books are a load of crap -- Philip Larkin
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I wonder love can have already set
In dreams, when we've not met
More times than I can number on one hand. -- Philip Larkin
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But superstition, like belief, must die ... -- Philip Larkin
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Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres. -- Philip Larkin
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As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like. -- Philip Larkin
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Since the majority of me Rejects the majority of you, Debating ends forthwith, and we Divide.' Philip Larkin -- Philip Larkin
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Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland. -- Philip Larkin
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Clearly money has something to do with life ... -- Philip Larkin
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What will survive of us is love.

- from A Writer -- Philip Larkin
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I would not dare
Console you if I could. What can be said,
Except that suffering is exact, but where
Desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic? -- Philip Larkin
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Life is first boredom, then fear.
whether or not we use it, it goes,
and leaves what something hidden from us chose,
and age, and then the only end of age. -- Philip Larkin
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Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems. -- Philip Larkin
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Sex means nothing
just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes. -- Philip Larkin
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A very crude difference between novels and poetry is that novels are about other people and poetry is about yourself. -- Philip Larkin
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It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write. -- Philip Larkin
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I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else, -- Philip Larkin
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I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me. -- Philip Larkin
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The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously. -- Philip Larkin
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One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another. -- Philip Larkin
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Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go / As if to win them back -- Philip Larkin
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Life is slow dying. -- Philip Larkin
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The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
From The Mower -- Philip Larkin
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I have started to say
"A quarter of a century"
Or "thirty years back"
About my own life. -- Philip Larkin
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Here is an unfenced existance -- Philip Larkin
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Above all, though, children are linked to adults by the simple fact that they are in process of turning into them. For this they may be forgiven much. Children are bound to be inferior to adults, or there is no incentive to grow up. -- Philip Larkin
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I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any-after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think? -- Philip Larkin
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One of the sadder things, I think,
Is how our birthdays slowly sink:
Presents and parties disappear,
The cards grow fewer year by year,
Till, when one reaches sixty-five,
How many care we're still alive? -- Philip Larkin
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I had a moral tutor, but never saw him (the only words of his I remember are 'The three pleasures of life -drinking, smoking, and masturbation') -- Philip Larkin
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Death is no different whined at than withstood. -- Philip Larkin
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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives, -- Philip Larkin
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So many things I had thought forgotten
Return to my mind with stranger pain:
Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago. -- Philip Larkin
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Morning, noon & bloody night,
Seven sodding days a week,
I slave at filthy WORK, that might
Be done by any book-drunk freak.
This goes on until I kick the bucket.
FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT -- Philip Larkin
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The sight of the money depressed her, because in such small familiar things the foreign country around her was best expressed. -- Philip Larkin
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Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word
the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again. -- Philip Larkin
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There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true! -- Philip Larkin
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I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals. -- Philip Larkin
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What will survive of us is love. -- Philip Larkin
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I think we got much better poetry when it was all regarded as sinful or subversive, and you had to hide it under the cushion when somebody came in. -- Philip Larkin
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Still, vicious or virtuous,
Love suits most of us. -- Philip Larkin
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I came to the conclusion that an enormous amount of research was needed to form an opinion on anything, and therefore abandoned politics altogether as a topic of conversation. -- Philip Larkin
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A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean anything to him. -- Philip Larkin
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Get stewed:Books are a load of crap. -- Philip Larkin
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Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth. -- Philip Larkin
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Joy
Is for the simple or the great to feel,
Neither of which we are. -- Philip Larkin
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Give me a thrill, says the reader,
Give me a kick;
I don't care how you succeed, or
What subject you pick. -- Philip Larkin
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I am awakened each dawn
Increasingly to fear ... -- Philip Larkin
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He [Samuel Butler] made a practise of doing the forks last when washing up, on the grounds that he might die before he got to them. This is very much his principle of 'eating the grapes downwards', so that however many grapes you have eaten the next is always the best of the remainder. -- Philip Larkin
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What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. Theyare to be happy in: Where can we live but days? -- Philip Larkin
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On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes. -- Philip Larkin
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Originality is being different from oneself, not others. -- Philip Larkin
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Most things may never happen: this one will. -- Philip Larkin
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Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are. -- Philip Larkin
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Boys dream of native girls who bring breadfruit,
Whatever they are ... -- Philip Larkin
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Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end. -- Philip Larkin
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Living toys are something novel,
But it soon wears off somehow. -- Philip Larkin
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...the breath that sharpens life is life itself... -- Philip Larkin
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There is bad in all good authors -- Philip Larkin
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Living in England has no such excuse:
These are my customs and establishments ... -- Philip Larkin
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They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do. -- Philip Larkin
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Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself. -- Philip Larkin
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I have wished you something
None of the others would ... -- Philip Larkin
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The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits. -- Philip Larkin
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SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles. -- Philip Larkin
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To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober. -- Philip Larkin
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Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes from death-
Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs. -- Philip Larkin
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Time is the echo of an axe
Within a wood. -- Philip Larkin
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Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it. -- Philip Larkin
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Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence. -- Philip Larkin
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Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance -- Philip Larkin
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Death: the anaesthetic from which none come round. -- Philip Larkin
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You can look out of your life like a train & see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train. -- Philip Larkin
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In life, as in art, talking vitiates doing. -- Philip Larkin
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Most people know more as they get older:
I give all that the cold shoulder. -- Philip Larkin
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You can't put off being young until you retire. -- Philip Larkin
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Only in books the flat and final happens,
Only in dreams we meet and interlock ... -- Philip Larkin
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Depression is to me as daffodils were to Wordsworth. -- Philip Larkin
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What one writes is based so much on the kind of person one is, the kind of environment one has had and has now. One doesn't really choose the poetry one writes, one writes the kind of poetry one has to write, or one can write. -- Philip Larkin