Quote

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.

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
Despite
Costly
Eyes
Aversion
Artful
Eye
Oblivion
Rites
Desire
Insurance
Tensions
Death
Beneath
Calendar
Running
Runs
Fertility
Life
Tension
Calendars
Solitude
Rite

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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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To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.
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Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
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He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day.
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SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.
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I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
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Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about.
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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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Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
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The difficult part of love Is being selfish enough.
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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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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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Get stewed:Books are a load of crap.
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We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.
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In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
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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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Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments.
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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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