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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.

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
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More quotes by Philip Larkin

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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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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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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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And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.
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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 think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
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Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
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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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We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.
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Parting is a training streamer,Lingering like leaves in autumn.
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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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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
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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.
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Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder.
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The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
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The breath that sharpens life is life itself.
Philip Larkin
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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said.
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There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
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In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
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Sexual intercourse began in 1963 ... / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LP
Philip Larkin