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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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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
True
Stills
Still
Unkind
Find
Untrue
Kind
Becomes
Words
Difficult

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To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted.
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On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.
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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
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One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the dame day as we do ourselves.
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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.
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Many famous feet have trod Sublunary paths, and famous hands have weighed The strength they have against the strength they need And famous lips interrogated God Concerning franchise in eternity.
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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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Sexual intercourse began in 1963 ... / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LP
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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.
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Clearly money has something to do with life.
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My age fallen away like white swaddling Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.
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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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I think we got much better poetry when it was all regarded as sinful or subversive, and you had to hide it under the cushion when somebody came in.
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Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
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Joy Is for the simple or the great to feel, Neither of which we are.
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The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
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Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.
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What are days for? Days are where we live.
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I am awakened each dawn Increasingly to fear.
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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.
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