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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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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
Pity
True
Writing
Good
Converse
Converses
Authors

More quotes by Philip Larkin

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Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.
Philip Larkin
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I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
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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Sexual intercourse began in 1963 ... / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LP
Philip Larkin
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Parting is a training streamer,Lingering like leaves in autumn.
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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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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Get stewed:Books are a load of crap.
Philip Larkin
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I am awakened each dawn Increasingly to fear.
Philip Larkin
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I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
Philip Larkin
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The poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It's more like a desire to separate a piece of one's experience & set it up on its own, an isolated object never to trouble you again, at least not for a bit. In the absence of this impulse nothing stirs.
Philip Larkin
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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
Philip Larkin
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Now, helpless in the hollow of An unarmorial age, a trough Of smoke in slow suspended skeins Above their scrap of history, Only an attitude remains: Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone finality They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.
Philip Larkin
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Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
Philip Larkin
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Still, vicious or virtuous, Love suits most of us.
Philip Larkin
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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 never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.
Philip Larkin
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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said.
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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The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.
Philip Larkin