Quote

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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Philip Larkin
Age: 63 †
Born: 1922
Born: August 9
Died: 1985
Died: December 2
Critic
Journalist
Librarian
Music Critic
Music Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Coventry
England
UK
Philip Arthur Larkin
Nothing
Loved
Sweeps
Done
Differences
Sleeps
Mean
Sleep
Cures
Make
Everyone
According
Love
Means
Loving
Life
Sense
Across
Others
Lived
Might
Difference

More quotes by 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.
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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.
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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.
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I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.
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Sexual intercourse began in 1963 ... / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LP
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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.
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To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted.
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Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder.
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One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
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My age fallen away like white swaddling Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.
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But, o, photography! as no art is,Faithful and disappointing! That recordsDull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,And will not censor blemishes,Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards
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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
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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.
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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.
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The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
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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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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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.
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What are days for? Days are where we live.
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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