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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
Woods
Understood
Within
Firsts
First
Echo
Thing
Echoes
Time
Wood

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To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.
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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?
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I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
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In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
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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.
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Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.
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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The difficult part of love Is being selfish enough.
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The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
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I think a young poet, or an old poet, for that matter, should try to produce something that pleases himself personally, not only when he's written it but a couple of weeks later. Then he should see if it pleases anyone else, by sending it to the kind of magazine he likes reading.
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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
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There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
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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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Life is first boredom, then fear.
Philip Larkin
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Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.
Philip Larkin
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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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And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.
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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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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As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like.
Philip Larkin