Quote

Life is first boredom, then fear. Whether or not we use it, it goes, And leaves what something hidden from us chose, And age, and then the only end of age.

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
Firsts
Aging
First
Leaves
Something
Goes
Life
Age
Whether
Use
Chose
Fear
Boredom
Ends
Hidden

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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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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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Life is first boredom, then fear.
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I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
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The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
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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 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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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said.
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Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder.
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Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
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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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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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One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the dame day as we do ourselves.
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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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Uncontradicting solitude Supports me on its giant palm And like a sea-anemone Or simple snail, there cautiously Unfolds, emerges, what I am.
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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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He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day.
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I am awakened each dawn Increasingly to fear.
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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 breath that sharpens life is life itself.
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