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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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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
Busy
Youth
Says
Courses
Wish
Next
Oeuvres
Thinking
Hors
Like
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More quotes by Philip Larkin

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The difficult part of love Is being selfish enough.
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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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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Get stewed:Books are a load of crap.
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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He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day.
Philip Larkin
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Parting is a training streamer,Lingering like leaves in autumn.
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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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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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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I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else.
Philip Larkin
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Clearly money has something to do with life.
Philip Larkin
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Still, vicious or virtuous, Love suits most of us.
Philip Larkin
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Any memory for the most part depending on chance.
Philip Larkin
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Here silence stands Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence: Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
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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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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I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
Philip Larkin
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Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
Philip Larkin