Quote

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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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
Stills
Till
Presents
Care
Disappear
Sink
Still
Grow
Sixty
Many
Grows
Parties
Years
Alive
Fewer
Things
Year
Slowly
Birthdays
Think
Five
Aging
Sadder
Thinking
Party
Cards
Reaches

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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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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.
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One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
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There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
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Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs: Despite the artful tensions of the calendar, The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites, The costly aversion of the eyes from death- Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.
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To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted.
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Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.
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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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Any memory for the most part depending on chance.
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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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The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
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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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Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
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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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I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.
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I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
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I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
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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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