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Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.

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
Sex
Minutes
Dies
Moment
Means
Moments
Flares
Nothing
Flare
Mean
Ecstasy

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To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.
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One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
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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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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said.
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The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
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Clearly money has something to do with life.
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I have wished you something None of the others would.
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Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.
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Still, vicious or virtuous, Love suits most of us.
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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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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.
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I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
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On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.
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Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments.
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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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The breath that sharpens life is life itself.
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Life and literature is a question of what one thrills to, and further than that no man shall ever go without putting his foot in a turd.
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Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
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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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It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.
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