Quote

But, o, photography! as no art is,Faithful and disappointing! That recordsDull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,And will not censor blemishes,Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards

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
Halls
Blemishes
Like
Boards
Frauds
Faithful
Censor
Dull
Disappointing
Photography
Washing
Hold
Smiles
Days
Hall
Lines
Fraud
Distemper

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On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.
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I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
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The breath that sharpens life is life itself.
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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.
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Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
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My age fallen away like white swaddling Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.
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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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It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.
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I have wished you something None of the others would.
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As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like.
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Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder.
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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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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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And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.
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Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.
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Get stewed:Books are a load of crap.
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