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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.

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
Seeking
Silence
Huge
Sailed
Break
Breed
Water
Unfamiliar
Black
Waters
Ship
Ships

More quotes by Philip Larkin

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I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.
Philip Larkin
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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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We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.
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Life is first boredom, then fear.
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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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You can look out of your life like a train & see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train.
Philip Larkin
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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said.
Philip Larkin
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A writer once said to me, If you ever go to America, go either to the East Coast or the West Coast: The rest is a desert full of bigots. That's what I think I'd like . . . a version of pastoral.
Philip Larkin
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I have wished you something None of the others would.
Philip Larkin
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Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous, Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water, Is earth's most multiple, excited daughter And those she has least use for see her best, Their paths grown craven and circuitous, Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest.
Philip Larkin
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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
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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Get stewed:Books are a load of crap.
Philip Larkin
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One of the sadder things, I think, Is how our birthdays slowly sink: Presents and parties disappear, The cards grow fewer year by year, Till, when one reaches sixty-five, How many care we're still alive?
Philip Larkin
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To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted.
Philip Larkin
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Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder.
Philip Larkin
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Parting is a training streamer,Lingering like leaves in autumn.
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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Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments.
Philip Larkin