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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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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
Poetry
Emotion
Instrument
Simply
Poem
Ends
Instruments
Begin
Poet
Reader

More quotes by 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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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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Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
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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My age fallen away like white swaddling Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.
Philip Larkin
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I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
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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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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And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.
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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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
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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Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments.
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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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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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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The breath that sharpens life is life itself.
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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Clearly money has something to do with life.
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