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It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.

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
Writing
Poems
Trying
Honour
Good
Bound
Bounds
Decide
Poetry
Instead
Intellectually
Write
Fatal

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Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
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Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.
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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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The breath that sharpens life is life itself.
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Get stewed:Books are a load of crap.
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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.
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Clearly money has something to do with life.
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... everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly.
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There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
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I have wished you something None of the others would.
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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.
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To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted.
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Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder.
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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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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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Still, vicious or virtuous, Love suits most of us.
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SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.
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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.
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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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