Top 100 Quotes About Philip Larkin
#1. 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
#2. Since the majority of me Rejects the majority of you, Debating ends forthwith, and we Divide.' Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin
#3. 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
#4. I like Philip Larkin an awful lot; I really like his view on life, and I really connect to it.
Domhnall Gleeson
#5. Philip Larkin has a tough honesty and sense of humor that I find irresistible, as a contemporary poet.
Robert Morgan
#6. Philip Larkin used to cheer himself up by looking in the mirror and saying the line from Rebecca, 'I am Mrs de Winter now!
Alan Bennett
#7. I did a load of medicine cabinets a long time ago and I named them after Sex Pistols songs. I suppose I must be getting old if I'm naming work after Philip Larkin poems.
Damien Hirst
#8. It's unthinkable not to love -you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.
Lawrence Durrell
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#14. In times when nothing stood / but worsened, or grew strange / there was one constant good: / she did not change.
Philip Larkin
#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. I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.
Philip Larkin
#19. Parting is a training streamer,Lingering like leaves in autumn ...
Philip Larkin
#21. My age fallen away like white swaddling
Floats in the middle distance, becomes
An inhabited cloud.
Philip Larkin
#22. I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
Philip Larkin
#23. Why can't one stop being a son without becoming a father?
Philip Larkin
#24. What will survive of us is love.
- from A Writer
Philip Larkin
#25. Clearly money has something to do with life ...
Philip Larkin
#26. 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
#27. Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.
Philip Larkin
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
Philip Larkin
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#36. 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
#38. Parents fuck you up. They don't mean to but they do.
Philip Larkin
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Mother's electric blanket broke, & I have 'mended' it, so she may be practising suttee involuntarily before long.
Philip Larkin
#42. Poetry is nobody's business except the poet's, and everybody else can fuck off.
Philip Larkin
#43. A good meal can somewhat repair / The eatings of slight love
Philip Larkin
#44. 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
#46. No one can tear your thread out of himself.
No one can tie you down or set you free.
Philip Larkin
#47. But O, Photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing!
Philip Larkin
#49. 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
#50. How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.
Philip Larkin
#51. I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
Philip Larkin
#52. One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
Philip Larkin
#53. 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
#54. Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.
Philip Larkin
#55. To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted
Philip Larkin
#56. And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.
Philip Larkin
#57. Living in England has no such excuse:
These are my customs and establishments ...
Philip Larkin
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Sex means nothing
just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
Philip Larkin
#61. I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else,
Philip Larkin
#62. Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
Philip Larkin
#63. Everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly.
Philip Larkin
#64. A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean anything to him.
Philip Larkin
#65. Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.
Philip Larkin
#66. They mess you up, your Mom and Dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had. And add some extra, just for you
Philip Larkin
#67. 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
#68. ...the breath that sharpens life is life itself...
Philip Larkin
#69. Living toys are something novel,
But it soon wears off somehow.
Philip Larkin
#70. 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
#71. Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
Philip Larkin
#72. Things are tougher than we are, just
As earth will always respond
However we mess it about ...
Philip Larkin
#73. 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
#74. Boys dream of native girls who bring breadfruit,
Whatever they are ...
Philip Larkin
#75. Still, vicious or virtuous,
Love suits most of us.
Philip Larkin
#76. Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.
Philip Larkin
#77. Ought we to smile / Perhaps make friends? No: in the race for seats / You're best alone. Friendship is not worth while.
Philip Larkin
#79. Originality is being different from oneself, not others.
Philip Larkin
#81. The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
From The Mower
Philip Larkin
#82. Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Philip Larkin
#83. SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.
Philip Larkin
#84. The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
Philip Larkin
#85. There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
Philip Larkin
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. I have wished you something
None of the others would ...
Philip Larkin
#89. On me your voice falls as they say love should,
Like an enormous yes.
Philip Larkin
#90. The sight of the money depressed her, because in such small familiar things the foreign country around her was best expressed.
Philip Larkin
#91. 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
#92. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself.
Philip Larkin
#93. They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
Philip Larkin
#94. Work is a kind of vacuum, an emptiness, where I just switch off everything except the scant intelligence necessary to keep me going. God, the people are awful - great carved monstrosities from the sponge-stone of secondratedness. Hideous.
Philip Larkin
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. I am awakened each dawn
Increasingly to fear ...
Philip Larkin
#99. The difficult part of love
Is being selfish enough ...
Philip Larkin
#100. I would not dare
Console you if I could. What can be said,
Except that suffering is exact, but where
Desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic?
Philip Larkin
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
