Philip Larkin Quotes

I think we got much better poetry when it was all regarded as sinful or subversive, and you had to hide it under the cushion when somebody came in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The breath that sharpens life is life itself.

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

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

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

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

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

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

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

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

Parting is a training streamer,Lingering like leaves in autumn.

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.

Most things may never happen: this one will.

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

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

Originality is being different from oneself, not others.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

They say eyes clear with age.

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

What are days for? Days are where we live.

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

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 am awakened each dawn Increasingly to fear.

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

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.

Clearly money has something to do with life.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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