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.

Any memory for the most part depending on chance.

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.

I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It's very strange how often strong feelings don't seem to carry any message of action

I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.

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?

Since the majority of me Rejects the majority of you, Debating ends forthwith, and we Divide.'' Philip Larkin