Top 100 Quotes About Larkin
#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. 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
#4. 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
#5. Intolerance has been the curse of our country.
James Larkin
#6. 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
#8. Comrades - We are living in momentous times.
James Larkin
#10. I'm much more capable of cutting back than of expanding. I've gotten very surgical about poems.
Joan Larkin
#11. 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
#12. In times when nothing stood / but worsened, or grew strange / there was one constant good: / she did not change.
Philip Larkin
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
Philip Larkin
#18. 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
#19. I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.
Philip Larkin
#20. Parting is a training streamer,Lingering like leaves in autumn ...
Philip Larkin
#21. 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
#22. 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
#24. My age fallen away like white swaddling
Floats in the middle distance, becomes
An inhabited cloud.
Philip Larkin
#25. Keep growing. Stay awake. Beware of gurus. Keep a low overhead.
Joan Larkin
#26. I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
Philip Larkin
#27. Why can't one stop being a son without becoming a father?
Philip Larkin
#28. For years and years I have done the work I was born for.
James Larkin
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. What will survive of us is love.
- from A Writer
Philip Larkin
#33. Clearly money has something to do with life ...
Philip Larkin
#34. 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
#35. Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.
Philip Larkin
#36. Since the majority of me Rejects the majority of you, Debating ends forthwith, and we Divide.' Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin
#37. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
Philip Larkin
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#50. 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
#52. Parents fuck you up. They don't mean to but they do.
Philip Larkin
#53. ...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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. Mother's electric blanket broke, & I have 'mended' it, so she may be practising suttee involuntarily before long.
Philip Larkin
#59. Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's, and everybody else can fuck off.
Philip Larkin
#60. A good meal can somewhat repair / The eatings of slight love
Philip Larkin
#61. 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
#63. No one can tear your thread out of himself.
No one can tie you down or set you free.
Philip Larkin
#64. But O, Photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing!
Philip Larkin
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.
Philip Larkin
#75. I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
Philip Larkin
#76. The best books of our times have included the three mature volumes of Philip Larkin. They're very short books of poems, and very carefully arranged.
Robert Morgan
#77. One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
Philip Larkin
#78. As anyone who has the slightest knowledge of my work knows, I have little in common with Larkin, who was tall, taciturn and thin-on-top, and unlike him I laugh, nay, sneer, in the face of death. I will concede one point: we are both lesbian poets.
Carol Ann Duffy
#79. Life is first boredom, then fear.
whether or not we use it, it goes,
and leaves what something hidden from us chose,
and age, and then the only end of age.
Philip Larkin
#81. The Great Commission is the primary task the Lord left his church. The church must always be a missionary church; the Christian must always be a world Christian.
William J. Larkin Jr.
#82. A killer on the payroll isn't good for business
L.A. Larkin
#83. Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.
Philip Larkin
#84. To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted
Philip Larkin
#85. I am careful about my conduct because I know this cause requires clean men.
James Larkin
#86. I remember there was this one lady shaman who said that having children puts a hole in your soul. And the only way to get it back is for your children to die. And, you know, monks don't have families.
Larkin Grimm
#87. And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.
Philip Larkin
#88. Calmness is a huge gift. And once you master it, you will be able to respond in a useful way to every difficult situation that decides to walk into your heart.
Geri Larkin
#89. Living in England has no such excuse:
These are my customs and establishments ...
Philip Larkin
#90. From the beginning. I was a poem-writing child. I wrote little novels in my composition book when I was eight, nine years old.
Joan Larkin
#91. There must be freedom for all to live, to think, to worship, no book, no avenue must be closed.
James Larkin
#92. Those who want to divide the workers have resorted to the foulest methods.
James Larkin
#93. 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
#94. Rhythms and sounds are often the first thing I hear and want in a poem, so I can't imagine trying to translate something without at least being able to hear what it sounds like.
Joan Larkin
#95. Teaching has given me a community that cares about poetry, and I'm grateful for that.
Joan Larkin
#96. 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
#97. Claiming for ourselves liberty of conscience, liberty to worship, we shall see to it that every other individual enjoys the same right.
James Larkin
#98. Sex means nothing
just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
Philip Larkin
#99. I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else,
Philip Larkin
#100. Russia is the only place where men and women can be free.
James Larkin
