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

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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.
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The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.
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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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I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
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Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
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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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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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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.
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Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
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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.
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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.
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On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.
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SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.
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Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
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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.
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Parting is a training streamer,Lingering like leaves in autumn.
Philip Larkin
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Joy Is for the simple or the great to feel, Neither of which we are.
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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Still, vicious or virtuous, Love suits most of us.
Philip Larkin
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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