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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.

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
Literature
Turd
Ever
Turds
Without
Thrills
Men
Foot
Life
Putting
Question
Feet
Shall

More quotes by Philip Larkin

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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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Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
Philip Larkin
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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.
Philip Larkin
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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said.
Philip Larkin
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Sexual intercourse began in 1963 ... / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LP
Philip Larkin
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I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
Philip Larkin
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I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else.
Philip Larkin
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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.
Philip Larkin
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This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.
Philip Larkin
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Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments.
Philip Larkin
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The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
Philip Larkin
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I have wished you something None of the others would.
Philip Larkin
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To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.
Philip Larkin
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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.
Philip Larkin
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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.
Philip Larkin
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I am awakened each dawn Increasingly to fear.
Philip Larkin
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Clearly money has something to do with life.
Philip Larkin
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Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about.
Philip Larkin
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What are days for? Days are where we live.
Philip Larkin
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Parting is a training streamer,Lingering like leaves in autumn.
Philip Larkin