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Philip Larkin Quotes
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The diatonic scale is what you use if you want to write a national anthem, or a love song, or a lullaby. The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema at the same time.
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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A poem is usually a highly professional artificial thing, a verbal device designed to reproduce a thought or emotion indefinitely: it shd have no dead parts, and every word should be completely unchangeable and unmoveable.
Philip Larkin
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- to start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted.
Philip Larkin
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I see life more as an affair of solitude diversified by company than an affair of company diversified by solitude.
Philip Larkin
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Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Philip Larkin
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But, o, photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing! That records
Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,
And will not censor blemishes,
Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards
Philip Larkin
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The quickest way to start a punch-up between two British literary critics is to ask them what they think of the poems of Sir John Betjeman
Philip Larkin
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I search myself for illusions like a monkey looking for fleas.
Philip Larkin
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Since the majority of me Rejects the majority of you, Debating ends forthwith, and we Divide.'' Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin
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Heads in the Women's Ward On pillow after pillow lies The wild white hair and staring eyes; Jaws stand open; necks are stretched With every tendon sharply sketched; A bearded mouth talks silently To someone no one else can see. Sixty years ago they smiled At lover, husband, first-born child. Smiles are for youth. For old age come Death's terror and delirium.
Philip Larkin
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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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Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:
'Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
I am all you never had of goods and sex.
You could get them still by writing a few cheques.'
Philip Larkin
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One of the sadder things, I think,
Is how our birthdays slowly sink:
Presents and parties disappear,
The cards grow fewer year by year,
Till, when one reaches sixty-five,
How many care we're still alive?
Philip Larkin
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And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There'll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.
Philip Larkin
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What was the rock my gliding childhood struck, / And what bright unreal path has led me here?'
Philip Larkin
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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.
Philip Larkin
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We had the old crow over at Hull recently, looking like a Christmas present from Easter Island.
Of Ted Hughes
Philip Larkin
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I listen to money singing. It's like looking down
From long french windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.
Philip Larkin
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What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?
Philip Larkin
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Quote of the day
That liberty is a great thing we may know from our own feelings, and we may likewise judge so from the conduct of the white-people, in the late war.
Jupiter Hammon
Philip Larkin
Born:
August 9, 1922
Died:
December 2, 1985
(aged 63)
Bio:
Philip Arthur Larkin was an English poet, novelist and librarian.
Known for:
High Windows
The Whitsun Weddings (1964)
The Less Deceived (1956)
Collected Poems
The North Ship (1945)
Most used words:
life
time
people
poems
poetry
love
sex
days
age
write
feel
thought
sun
children
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