Top 100 Philip Larkin Quotes
#1. My mother, who hates thunderstorms,
Holds up each summer day and shakes
It out suspiciously, lest swarms
Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there ...
Philip Larkin
#2. When I get sent manuscripts from aspiring poets, I do one of two things: if there is no stamped self-addressed envelope, I throw it into the bin.-If there is, I write and tell them to f**k off.
Philip Larkin
#3. Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything - these are sort of 'ideal' poems that one feels ought to be written, but don't because (I fancy) they lack the vital spark of self-interest. A 'real' poem is a pleasure to write.
Philip Larkin
#5. My age fallen away like white swaddling
Floats in the middle distance, becomes
An inhabited cloud.
Philip Larkin
#6. I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
Philip Larkin
#7. Why can't one stop being a son without becoming a father?
Philip Larkin
#8. What will survive of us is love.
- from A Writer
Philip Larkin
#9. Clearly money has something to do with life ...
Philip Larkin
#10. Earth never grieves, I thought, walking across the park, watching seagulls cruising greedily above the ground looking for heaven knows what. Don't you think it's a good line? A very good line
Philip Larkin
#11. Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.
Philip Larkin
#12. Since the majority of me Rejects the majority of you, Debating ends forthwith, and we Divide.' Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin
#14. If I looked into your face / expecting a word or a laugh on the old conditions, / it would not be a friend who met my eye
Philip Larkin
#15. As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like.
Philip Larkin
#16. It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
Philip Larkin
#17. 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.
Philip Larkin
#18. 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
#21. Parents fuck you up. They don't mean to but they do.
Philip Larkin
#22. Mother's electric blanket broke, & I have 'mended' it, so she may be practising suttee involuntarily before long.
Philip Larkin
#23. Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's, and everybody else can fuck off.
Philip Larkin
#24. A good meal can somewhat repair / The eatings of slight love
Philip Larkin
#25. 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
#26. But O, Photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing!
Philip Larkin
#28. Much better stay in company!
To love you must have someone else,
Giving requires a legatee,
Good neighbours need whole parishfuls
Of folk to do it on - in short,
Our virtues are all social; if,
Deprived of solitude, you chafe,
It's clear you're not the virtuous sort.
Philip Larkin
#29. How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.
Philip Larkin
#30. One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
Philip Larkin
#31. Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.
Philip Larkin
#32. And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.
Philip Larkin
#33. Living in England has no such excuse:
These are my customs and establishments ...
Philip Larkin
#34. I am beginning to think of the human imagination as a fruit machine on which victories are rare and separated by much vain expense, and represent a rare alignment of mental and spiritual qualities that normally are quite at odds.
Philip Larkin
#35. Only the young can be alone freely. The time is shorter now for company, And sitting by a lamp more often brings Not peace, but other things.
Philip Larkin
#36. Sex means nothing
just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
Philip Larkin
#37. I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else,
Philip Larkin
#38. Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
Philip Larkin
#39. Everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly.
Philip Larkin
#40. A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean anything to him.
Philip Larkin
#41. 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
#42. ...the breath that sharpens life is life itself...
Philip Larkin
#43. Living toys are something novel,
But it soon wears off somehow.
Philip Larkin
#44. Morning, noon & bloody night,
Seven sodding days a week,
I slave at filthy WORK, that might
Be done by any book-drunk freak.
This goes on until I kick the bucket.
FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT
Philip Larkin
#45. 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
#46. Boys dream of native girls who bring breadfruit,
Whatever they are ...
Philip Larkin
#47. Still, vicious or virtuous,
Love suits most of us.
Philip Larkin
#48. Ought we to smile / Perhaps make friends? No: in the race for seats / You're best alone. Friendship is not worth while.
Philip Larkin
#50. Originality is being different from oneself, not others.
Philip Larkin
#52. SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.
Philip Larkin
#53. The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
Philip Larkin
#54. 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.
Philip Larkin
#55. I think a young poet, or an old poet, for that matter, should try to produce something that pleases himself personally, not only when he's written it but a couple of weeks later. Then he should see if it pleases anyone else, by sending it to the kind of magazine he likes reading.
Philip Larkin
#56. I have wished you something
None of the others would ...
Philip Larkin
#57. 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.
Philip Larkin
#58. One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the same day as we do ourselves.
Philip Larkin
#59. You can look out of your life like a train & see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train.
Philip Larkin
#60. I am awakened each dawn
Increasingly to fear ...
Philip Larkin
#62. The difficult part of love
Is being selfish enough ...
Philip Larkin
#63. He [Samuel Butler] made a practise of doing the forks last when washing up, on the grounds that he might die before he got to them. This is very much his principle of 'eating the grapes downwards', so that however many grapes you have eaten the next is always the best of the remainder.
Philip Larkin
#64. Give me a thrill, says the reader,
Give me a kick;
I don't care how you succeed, or
What subject you pick.
Philip Larkin
#66. Many famous feet have trod
Sublunary paths, and famous hands have weighed
The strength they have against the strength they need;
And famous lips interrogated God
Concerning franchise in eternity ...
Philip Larkin
#67. You can't put off being young until you retire.
Philip Larkin
#68. I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others & myself ...
Philip Larkin
#69. The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.
Philip Larkin
#70. A very crude difference between novels and poetry is that novels are about other people and poetry is about yourself.
Philip Larkin
#71. Depression is to me as daffodils were to Wordsworth.
Philip Larkin
#73. Any memory for the most part depending on chance.
Philip Larkin
#74. What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. Theyare to be happy in: Where can we live but days?
Philip Larkin
#75. Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.
Philip Larkin
#76. Joy
Is for the simple or the great to feel,
Neither of which we are.
Philip Larkin
#77. They both rise / Make for the Coke dispenser. 'What's he like? / Christ, I just told you.
Philip Larkin
#78. It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.
Philip Larkin
#79. I'd like to think ... that people in pubs would talk about my poems
Philip Larkin
#81. 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
#82. I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.
Philip Larkin
#83. It's easy to write when you've nothing to write about
(That is, when you are young) ...
Philip Larkin
#84. Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.
Philip Larkin
#85. Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself
Philip Larkin
#86. Most people know more as they get older:
I give all that the cold shoulder.
Philip Larkin
#87. I suppose if one lives to be old, one's entire waking life will be spent turning on the spit of recollection over the fires of mingled shame, pain or remorse. Cheerful prospect!
Philip Larkin
#88. The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke ...
Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can't come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.
Philip Larkin
#89. Only in books the flat and final happens,
Only in dreams we meet and interlock ...
Philip Larkin
#90. What one writes is based so much on the kind of person one is, the kind of environment one has had and has now. One doesn't really choose the poetry one writes, one writes the kind of poetry one has to write, or one can write.
Philip Larkin
#91. 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?
Philip Larkin
#92. Selflessness is like waiting in a hospital
In a badly-fitting suit on a cold wet morning.
Selfishness is like listening to good jazz
With drinks for further orders and a huge fire.
Philip Larkin
#94. I came to the conclusion that an enormous amount of research was needed to form an opinion on anything, and therefore abandoned politics altogether as a topic of conversation.
Philip Larkin
#95. I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.
Philip Larkin
#96. I like spaghetti because you don't have to take your eyes off the book to pick about among it, it's all the same.
Philip Larkin
#97. 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
Philip Larkin
#98. Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous,
Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water,
Is earth's most multiple, excited daughter;
And those she has least use for see her best,
Their paths grown craven and circuitous,
Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest.
Philip Larkin
#100. If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'
Philip Larkin
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