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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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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
Thing
Life
Preserve
Preserves
Artist
Art
Feel
Feels
Children

More quotes by Philip Larkin

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We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.
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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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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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 work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
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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Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder.
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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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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Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
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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The breath that sharpens life is life itself.
Philip Larkin
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SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.
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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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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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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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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Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.
Philip Larkin
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This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.
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