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

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I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
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I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
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In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
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... everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly.
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When I get sent manuscripts from aspiring poets, I do one of two things: if there is no stamped self-addressed envelope, I throw it into the bin.-If there is, I write and tell them to f**k off.
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Life is first boredom, then fear.
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In everyone there sleeps. A sense of life lived according to love. To some it means the difference they could make. By loving others, but across most it sweeps. As all they might have done had they been loved. That nothing cures.
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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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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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Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
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Get stewed:Books are a load of crap.
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The difficult part of love Is being selfish enough.
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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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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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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
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The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said.
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