Best 138 quotes of Philip Larkin on MyQuotes

Philip Larkin

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    Philip Larkin

    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.

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    Philip Larkin

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

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    Philip Larkin

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

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    Philip Larkin

    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.

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    Philip Larkin

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

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    Philip Larkin

    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.

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    Philip Larkin

    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.

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    Philip Larkin

    Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs: Despite the artful tensions of the calendar, The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites, The costly aversion of the eyes from death- Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.

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    Philip Larkin

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

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    Philip Larkin

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

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    Philip Larkin

    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

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    Philip Larkin

    But superstition, like belief, must die.

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    Philip Larkin

    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.

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    Philip Larkin

    Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.

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    Philip Larkin

    Depression is to me as daffodils were to Wordsworth.

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    Philip Larkin

    Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

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    Philip Larkin

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

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    Philip Larkin

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

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    Philip Larkin

    Get stewed:Books are a load of crap.

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    Philip Larkin

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

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    Philip Larkin

    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.

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    Philip Larkin

    He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day.

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    Philip Larkin

    Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.

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    Philip Larkin

    Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go / As if to win them back

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    Philip Larkin

    I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.

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    Philip Larkin

    I am awakened each dawn Increasingly to fear.

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    Philip Larkin

    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.

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    Philip Larkin

    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.

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    Philip Larkin

    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.

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    Philip Larkin

    I'd like to think...that people in pubs would talk about my poems

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    Philip Larkin

    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.

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    Philip Larkin

    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.

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    Philip Larkin

    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

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    Philip Larkin

    I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.

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    Philip Larkin

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

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    Philip Larkin

    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.

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    Philip Larkin

    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.

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    Philip Larkin

    I'm terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I 'do' anything or not. In a way I may believe, deep down, that doing nothing acts as a brake on 'time's - it doesn't of course. It merely adds the torment of having done nothing, when the time comes when it really doesn't matter if you've done anything or not.

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    Philip Larkin

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

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    Philip Larkin

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

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    Philip Larkin

    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.

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    Philip Larkin

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

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    Philip Larkin

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

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    Philip Larkin

    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.

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    Philip Larkin

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

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    Philip Larkin

    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.

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    Philip Larkin

    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?

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    Philip Larkin

    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.

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    Philip Larkin

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

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    Philip Larkin

    I wonder love can have already set In dreams, when we've not met More times than I can number on one hand.