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Philip Larkin

May out of the clouds of chanceA calm wind blow, a bird be sighted and steerStraight for your bough, and its pursuing loveBreak in the air, a scarlet target afloatFor the strength of your striking arrow; — Philip Larkin, from section III of “Now,” The Complete Poems, ed. Archie Burnett (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012)

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Jeanette Winterson

All human love is a dramatic enactment of the wild, reckless, unquenchable, undrainable love that powers the universe. If death is everywhere and inescapable, then so is love, if we but knew it. We can begin to know it through each other. The tamer my love, the farther away it is from love. In fierceness,… Continue reading Jeanette Winterson

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Virginia Woolf

What is meant by ‘reality’? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home… Continue reading Virginia Woolf

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Anthology · British Culture · Classic · Collection · Compilation · English Literature · Excerpt · Fragment · Passage · Poetry

Philip Larkin

Truly, though our element is time,We are not suited to the long perspectivesOpen at each instant of our lives.They link us to our losses: worse,They show us what we have as it once was,Blindingly undiminished, just as thoughBy acting differently, we could have kept it so. — Philip Larkin, from “Reference Back,” The Complete Poems… Continue reading Philip Larkin

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