Top 100 Larkin's Quotes
#1. As awkward as it sounds. I'm not Shane Larkin, Barry Larkin's son, anymore. It's Barry Larkin, the father of Shane Larkin.
Shane Larkin
#2. Watching Larkin's efforts, Rearden felt what he did when he watched an ant struggling under the load of a matchstick. It's so hard for him, thought Rearden, and so easy for me.
Ayn Rand
#3. 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
#4. I wonder love can have already set
In dreams, when we've not met
More times than I can number on one hand.
Philip Larkin
#5. We make mistakes, we have our faults, and God knows some of us have more than our share, but when danger threatens and duty calls, we go smiling to our own funeral.
James Larkin
#6. Dixie?" "Yeah." "You ever try to crack an AI?" "Sure. I flatlined. First time. I was larkin', jacked up real high, out by Rio heavy commerce sector. Big biz, multinationals, Government of Brazil lit up like a Christmas tree.
William Gibson
#7. A mutual arrangement, I repeat, is the only satisfactory medium whereby the present system can be carried on with any degree of satisfaction, and in such an arrangement the employers have more to gain than the workers.
James Larkin
#8. He sighed and said, "Is this the part where I have to tell you how my plan played out? This isn't Scooby Doo.
Gillian Larkin
#9. The question of religion was a matter for each individual's conscience, and in a great many cases was the outcome of birth or residence in a certain geographical area.
James Larkin
#10. People need what they think of as a poem to be read at their bar mitzvah, their wedding, a funeral, whatever. And people are looking for hope and inspiration. I understand that.
Joan Larkin
#11. There are some books in which every poem is a facet of the same thing. So the book is like a piece of music. And there are books of poems that I love so much that I carry them around with me.
Joan Larkin
#13. But O, Photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing!
Philip Larkin
#14. No one can tear your thread out of himself.
No one can tie you down or set you free.
Philip Larkin
#16. 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
#17. A good meal can somewhat repair / The eatings of slight love
Philip Larkin
#18. Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's, and everybody else can fuck off.
Philip Larkin
#19. Mother's electric blanket broke, & I have 'mended' it, so she may be practising suttee involuntarily before long.
Philip Larkin
#20. The fate of you, the aristocracy of industry, will be as the fate of the aristocracy of land if you do not show that you have some humanity still among you.
James Larkin
#21. My message to a lot of guys is, if you like school and you like education, baseball is gonna be there, and you can get some of the same great competition in college that you do in the low minor leagues.
Barry Larkin
#22. I was sleeping, and you woke me
To walk on the chilled shore
Of a night with no memory,
Till your voice forsook my ear
Till your two hands withdrew
And I was empty of tears,
On the edge of a bricked and streeted sea
And a cold hill of stars.
Philip Larkin
#23. Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off? Six days of the week it soils With its sickening poison
Just for paying a few bills! That's out of proportion.
Philip Larkin
#24. ...Newspapers, popular fiction, and magazines churned out words by the million, and the worn coins of everyday speech were less and less able to communicate anything more than the most commonplace meanings....
Lachman Gary Larkin Steve
#25. Parents fuck you up. They don't mean to but they do.
Philip Larkin
#27. 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
#28. I love that people want to know about poetry. It's one of the ways of keeping alive.
Joan Larkin
#29. 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
#30. It's unthinkable not to love -you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.
Lawrence Durrell
#31. 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
#32. Some people is born at the start of a long hard row to hoe. Well, I am older than God's dog and been in this world a long time and it seems to me that right from the git-go, Larkin Stanton had the longest and hardest row I've ever seen.
Sheila Kay Adams
#33. 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
#34. By God's help, and the intelligent use of their own strong right arms they could accomplish great things.
James Larkin
#35. It's easy to write when you've nothing to write about
(That is, when you are young) ...
Philip Larkin
#36. That's the biggest problem with personas. A false self can never rest. It looks like a real person, but a persona is actually just a hologram, a projected image, and it requires constant energy to keep that image up. A persona is afraid to go to sleep, because to sleep is to die.
Nate Larkin
#37. There's a curse on me as there's a curse on the Larkin name. The curse comes back, again and again, to taunt me! Ronan! Kilty! Tomas! And now me! What are the Irish among men? Are we lepers? Are we a blight? Will there ever be an end to our tears?
Leon Uris
#38. 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.
Philip Larkin
#39. They both rise / Make for the Coke dispenser. 'What's he like? / Christ, I just told you.
Philip Larkin
#40. How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.
Philip Larkin
#41. It's the sense of walking back into the Garden of Eden or something like that. Where suddenly everything is perfect and you see how you're connected to everything in the world.
Larkin Grimm
#42. Now that's true poetic irony. I rush into battle to defend the fair name of Rose Larkin, and what does she do but fetch Robert to stop me.
Franny Billingsley
#43. What's the point of living if it's going to be easy?
Jillian Larkin
#44. We Burmese,' he began, 'are experts at looking for what's not there. It's something you should learn to do too. You must look for what's missing and learn how to find the truth in these absences.
Emma Larkin
#45. There's a Buddhist story about the guy who wants to be enlightened, and then he gets a cow and a wife and a child, and all these things get in the way of his enlightenment. So, yeah, I have no chance of being enlightened.
Larkin Grimm
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. There's always some reason not to be writing and I regret the times I give in to that, because then writing feels strange - I feel like I have to reinvent the wheel. There are poets who don't have to do that.
Joan Larkin
#49. I just know of so many musicians who burn out because they go on tour and they have to play their one-hit song over and over and over and over again. And they are not moved by their own song. And then when you go and see them perform there's something off.
Larkin Grimm
#50. 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
#51. Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.
Philip Larkin
#52. In times when nothing stood / but worsened, or grew strange / there was one constant good: / she did not change.
Philip Larkin
#53. My age fallen away like white swaddling
Floats in the middle distance, becomes
An inhabited cloud.
Philip Larkin
#55. My books have come many years apart and each one seems to reflect a period of experience. Ending the book is like putting a period on a certain movement. Interior and external - both.
Joan Larkin
#56. Poetry is a tree with very deep roots and while there may be excitement about this or that new little branch, you're not going to make anything original by just doing whatever's being rewarded at the moment.
Joan Larkin
#57. Parting is a training streamer,Lingering like leaves in autumn ...
Philip Larkin
#58. I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.
Philip Larkin
#59. The stance I took was there is no room for racial bias anywhere in sports. I believe that was basically all I said about it. Certainly I was cast as an abolitionist. Death threats came. Hate mail came.
Barry Larkin
#60. Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
Philip Larkin
#61. To put one brick upon another,
Add a third, and then a fourth,
Leaves no time to wonder whether
What you do has any worth.
Philip Larkin
#62. 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
#63. I think parenting actually makes you lose pieces of your soul again, because they go off, into your children. Or, I mean, I am so fragmented, and I'm such a spacey person.
Larkin Grimm
#64. The employers cannot carry on industry nor accumulate profits if they have not got the good will of the workers or their acquiescence in carrying on such industry.
James Larkin
#65. Keep growing. Stay awake. Beware of gurus. Keep a low overhead.
Joan Larkin
#66. We shall not fight for the preservation of the enemy, which has laid waste with death and desolation the fields and hills of Ireland for 700 years.
James Larkin
#67. I'm much more capable of cutting back than of expanding. I've gotten very surgical about poems.
Joan Larkin
#69. Comrades - We are living in momentous times.
James Larkin
#71. You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso.
Philip Larkin
#72. Intolerance has been the curse of our country.
James Larkin
#73. The closest thing I could think of that men go through is like a prisoner of war being tortured, and then coming back from that experience. It's traumatic and grounding and makes you commit to the world. Also, because you want all of these things for your kid.
Larkin Grimm
#74. Most writers deserve the reputation posterity has bestowed upon them: You can't for long conceal the toxic spots on your character - Philip Larkin is Exhibit A - nor can you conceal your dignity, your humanism, your regard for veracity and freedom.
William Giraldi
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. We start each day with a blank sheet of paper in front of us, and what we write on it is up to us.
John Larkin
#78. I've learned that by returning my calls between 11:00 a.m. and noon and 4:00 and 5:00 p.m. I can keep them short and to the point because people are either hungry and starting to think about lunch or they are trying to gear down at the end of the day.
Geri Larkin
#79. People want poetry and need it - we need what's not honored by the corporate mentality that has taken over. It gives people a language for responding to the violence, the shallowness, the near-nothings, the toys we're all supposed to want. It's a way for people to be able to connect with themselves.
Joan Larkin
#80. 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
#81. And I am sick for want of sleep;
So sick, that I can half-believe
The soundless river pouring from the cave
Is neither strong nor deep;
Only an image fancied in conceit.
Philip Larkin
#82. 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
#83. You understand your place in it, and you feel an incredible love for everyone and everything, and you're just sublimely happy, and then you're suddenly jolted back to reality, and you've got to deal with the world as it is
Larkin Grimm
#84. It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
Philip Larkin
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. I was a sound engineer, and all of these gurus and shamans would come, and I would record the workshops they were teaching. And I took part in a shamanic journeying workshop, and this woman leading the workshop had brought Ayahuasca, which is a Peruvian hallucinogen and contains DMT.
Larkin Grimm
#90. Since the majority of me Rejects the majority of you, Debating ends forthwith, and we Divide.' Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin
#91. Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.
Philip Larkin
#92. 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
#93. Clearly money has something to do with life ...
Philip Larkin
#94. What will survive of us is love.
- from A Writer
Philip Larkin
#95. I did enjoy football, but the injury factor for me, you know, I had so many issues. I don't know how long my career would've been.
Barry Larkin
#96. We checked ourselves in the mirror before we left. We were flushed and a little rumpled, but in a good way. We looked vibrant, wild, happy. The hair and the clothes and the makeup made me feel like someone new, but the happy is what made me unrecognizable.
Allie Larkin
#97. Why even live? If that's your goal, if you're just clamoring your way to the top, I mean, why even have a life? Somebody was telling me the other day about the lives of investment bankers who work ninety hours a week and how it affects their patterns of consumption.
Larkin Grimm
#98. For years and years I have done the work I was born for.
James Larkin
#99. Why can't one stop being a son without becoming a father?
Philip Larkin
#100. I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
Philip Larkin
