Quote

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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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
Path
Seasons
Craven
Race
Excited
Gratuitous
Clear
Mountain
Fold
Water
Daughter
Folds
Use
Spring
Visions
Earth
Flower
Paths
Untaught
Best
Vision
Multiple
Circuitous
Needs
Least
Grown
Immodest

More quotes by Philip Larkin

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Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments.
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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 only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
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Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
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Give me a thrill, says the reader, Give me a kick I don't care how you succeed, or What subject you pick.
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Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
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I think a young poet, or an old poet, for that matter, should try to produce something that pleases himself personally, not only when he's written it but a couple of weeks later. Then he should see if it pleases anyone else, by sending it to the kind of magazine he likes reading.
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Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
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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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On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.
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The breath that sharpens life is life itself.
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It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.
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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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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
Philip Larkin
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Many famous feet have trod Sublunary paths, and famous hands have weighed The strength they have against the strength they need And famous lips interrogated God Concerning franchise in eternity.
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To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.
Philip Larkin
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To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted.
Philip Larkin
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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.
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... everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly.
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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.
Philip Larkin