Philip Larkin Quotes
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Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.
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They say eyes clear with age.
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Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are, to recreate the familiar, eternalizing the poet's own perception in unique and original verbal form.
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They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.
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I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.
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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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I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any-after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think?
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Get stewed:Books are a load of crap.
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What was the rock my gliding childhood struck, / And what bright unreal path has led me here?
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Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.
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Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself.
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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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I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.
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Above all, though, children are linked to adults by the simple fact that they are in process of turning into them. For this they may be forgiven much. Children are bound to be inferior to adults, or there is no incentive to grow up.
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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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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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The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time.
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- to start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted.
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Death is no different whined at than withstood.
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But, o, photography! as no art is,Faithful and disappointing! That recordsDull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,And will not censor blemishes,Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards
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I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.
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But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats,Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another's throats.
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But superstition, like belief, must die...
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The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love, Broke out, to showIts bright incipience sailing above,Still promising to solve, and satisfy,And set unchangeably in order. So To pile them back, to cry,Was hard, without lamely admitting howIt had not done so then, and could not now.