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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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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
Time
Echoes
Wood
Woods
Understood
Within
Firsts
First
Thing
Echo

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What are days for? Days are where we live.
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Clearly money has something to do with life.
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I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
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I have wished you something None of the others would.
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Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
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When I get sent manuscripts from aspiring poets, I do one of two things: if there is no stamped self-addressed envelope, I throw it into the bin.-If there is, I write and tell them to f**k off.
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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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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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The breath that sharpens life is life itself.
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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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.
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Any memory for the most part depending on chance.
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We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.
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SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.
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Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder.
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Life is first boredom, then fear.
Philip Larkin
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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said.
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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There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
Philip Larkin
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I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.
Philip Larkin