Philip Larkin Quotations

Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.

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.

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?

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.

In everyone there sleeps. A sense of life lived according to love. To some it means the difference they could make. By loving others, but across most it sweeps. As all they might have done had they been loved. That nothing cures.

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

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

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

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.

You can't put off being young until you retire.

Sexual intercourse beganin nineteen sixty-three(Which was rather late for me)between the end of the Chatterley banand the Beatles' first LP.

Why should I let the toad work / Squat on my life?

Far too many relied on the classic formula of a beginning, a muddle, and an end

In everyone there sleeps / A sense of life lived according to love. / To some it means the difference they could make / By loving others, but across most it sweeps / As all they might have done had they been loved. / That nothing cures.

I dream about that sometimes-and wake up screaming. With any luck they'll pass me over.

Give me a thrill, says the reader, Give me a kick; I don't care how you succeed, or What subject you pick.

The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.

Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.

They say eyes clear with age.

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.

Death: the anaesthetic from which none come round.

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.

And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.

A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean anything to him.

Uncontradicting solitude Supports me on its giant palm; And like a sea-anemone Or simple snail, there cautiously Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

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.

Get stewed:Books are a load of crap.

Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.

Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past Without a word--the men Leaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriages Lasting a little while longer: Never such innocence again.

Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood.

I have started to say "A quarter of a century" Or "thirty years back" About my own life.

We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.

SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.

A good meal can somewhat repair / The eatings of slight love

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night,

The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.

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.

But O, Photography! as no art is, Faithful and disappointing!

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.

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.

If we seriously contemplate life it appears an agony too great to be supported, but for the most part our minds gloss such things over & until the ice finally lets us through we skate about merrily enough. Most people, I'm convinced, don't think about life at all. They grab what they think they want and the subsequent consequences keep them busy in an endless chain till they're carried out feet first.

Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It's terrible the way we scotch silence & solitude at every turn, quite suicidal. I can't see how to avoid it, without being very rich or very unpopular, & it does worry me, for time is slipping by , and nothing is done. It isn't as if anything was gained by this social frivolity, It isn't: it's just a waste.

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.

To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted

The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said;

You can look out of your life like a train & see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train.

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are, to recreate the familar,eternalizing the poet's own poerception in unique and original verbal form.

All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives,

I don’t think I write well—just better than anyone else,

What are days for? Days are where we live.

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

My mother, who hates thunderstorms, Holds up each summer day and shakes It out suspiciously, lest swarms Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there....

And immediately 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.

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

In times when nothing stood but worsened, or grew strange, there was one constant good: she did not change.

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.

I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.

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.'

No one can tear your thread out of himself. No one can tie you down or set you free.

... everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly.

Clearly money has something to do with life....

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.

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....

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.

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.

Still, vicious or virtuous, Love suits most of us.

Any memory for the most part depending on chance.

I am awakened each dawn Increasingly to fear....

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.

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.

I am not sure, once a poet has found out what has been written already, and how it was written - once, in short, he has learnt his trade - that he should bother with literature at all. Poetry is not like surgery, a technique that can be copied. Every operation the poet performs is unique, and need never be done again.

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.

In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.

Joy Is for the simple or the great to feel, Neither of which we are.

Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments....

Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.

The difficult part of love Is being selfish enough....

But, o, photography! as no art is,Faithful and disappointing! That recordsDull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,And will not censor blemishes,Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her backA huge and birdless silence. In her wakeNo waters breed or break.

But superstition, like belief, must die...

One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.

Walk with the dead For fear of death.

Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder.

My age fallen away like white swaddling Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.

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?

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.

I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.

Boys dream of native girls who bring breadfruit, Whatever they are....

Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.

Heads in the Women's Ward On pillow after pillow lies The wild white hair and staring eyes; Jaws stand open; necks are stretched With every tendon sharply sketched; A bearded mouth talks silently To someone no one else can see. Sixty years ago they smiled At lover, husband, first-born child. Smiles are for youth. For old age come Death's terror and delirium.

On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.

The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself

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

As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief n 'tradition' or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people.

Depression is to me as daffodils were to Wordsworth.

Here silence stands Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends; And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence: Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

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.

Most things may never happen: this one will.

Only in books the flat and final happens, Only in dreams we meet and interlock....