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Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.

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
Practice
Living
Live
Life

More quotes by 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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He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day.
Philip Larkin
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I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
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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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.
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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I am beginning to think of the human imagination as a fruit machine on which victories are rare and separated by much vain expense, and represent a rare alignment of mental and spiritual qualities that normally are quite at odds.
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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What are days for? Days are where we live.
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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In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
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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Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.
Philip Larkin
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One of the sadder things, I think, Is how our birthdays slowly sink: Presents and parties disappear, The cards grow fewer year by year, Till, when one reaches sixty-five, How many care we're still alive?
Philip Larkin
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I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else.
Philip Larkin
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Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.
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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This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.
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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Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
Philip Larkin