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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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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
Feel
Feels
Great
Neither
Joy
Simple

More quotes by Philip Larkin

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Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
Philip Larkin
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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
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I am awakened each dawn Increasingly to fear.
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.
Philip Larkin
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Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
Philip Larkin
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Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about.
Philip Larkin
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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.
Philip Larkin
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Life is first boredom, then fear.
Philip Larkin
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Here silence stands Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence: Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
Philip Larkin
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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.
Philip Larkin
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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said.
Philip Larkin
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Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres.
Philip Larkin
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And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.
Philip Larkin
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On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.
Philip Larkin
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This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.
Philip Larkin
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Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder.
Philip Larkin
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The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
Philip Larkin
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What are days for? Days are where we live.
Philip Larkin
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Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments.
Philip Larkin
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Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance.
Philip Larkin