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I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.

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
Lies
Lying
Art
Think
Thinking
Preserve
Preserves
Impulse
Bottom

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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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Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
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The breath that sharpens life is life itself.
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Any memory for the most part depending on chance.
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Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
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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.
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Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments.
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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. 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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I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
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My age fallen away like white swaddling Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.
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Here silence stands Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence: Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
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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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Clearly money has something to do with life.
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In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
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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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SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.
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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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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said.
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Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
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