Quote

Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off? Six days of the week it soils With its sickening poison-- Just for paying a few bills! That's out of proportion.

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
Week
Wit
Pitchforks
Days
Paying
Soils
Use
Poison
Sickening
Work
Proportion
Toad
Life
Soil
Toads
Bills
Squat
Drive
Brute
Six
Brutes
Pitchfork

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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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Clearly money has something to do with life.
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I am awakened each dawn Increasingly to fear.
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Only one ship is seeking us, a black-Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her backA huge and birdless silence. In her wakeNo waters breed or break.
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The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
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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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Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments.
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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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Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.
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We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.
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He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day.
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There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
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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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I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else.
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I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
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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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It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.
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SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.
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I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.
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