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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
Art
Think
Thinking
Preserve
Preserves
Impulse
Bottom
Lies
Lying

More quotes by Philip Larkin

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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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Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
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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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Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.
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Any memory for the most part depending on chance.
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On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.
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The difficult part of love Is being selfish enough.
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There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
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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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My age fallen away like white swaddling Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.
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Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
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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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The breath that sharpens life is life itself.
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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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Life is first boredom, then fear. Whether or not we use it, it goes, And leaves what something hidden from us chose, And age, and then the only end of age.
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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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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.
Philip Larkin
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I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else.
Philip Larkin
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And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.
Philip Larkin