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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
Firsts
First
Thing
Echo
Time
Echoes
Wood
Woods
Understood
Within

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And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.
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Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder.
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Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.
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I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
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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.
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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.
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As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like.
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He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day.
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I am awakened each dawn Increasingly to fear.
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I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
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Clearly money has something to do with life.
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Any memory for the most part depending on chance.
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The difficult part of love Is being selfish enough.
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Still, vicious or virtuous, Love suits most of us.
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Life is first boredom, then fear.
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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
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On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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