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.

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

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

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

Life is first boredom, then fear,

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.

How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.

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.

So many things I had thought forgotten Return to my mind with stranger pain: Like letters that arrive addressed to someone Who left the house so many years ago.

This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.

Now, helpless in the hollow of An unarmorial age, a trough Of smoke in slow suspended skeins Above their scrap of history, Only an attitude remains: Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone finality They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.

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

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

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

To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.

Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about....

It's easy to write when you've nothing to write about (That is, when you are young)....

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.

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

Sexual intercourse began in 1963 ... / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LP

As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like.

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

What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. Theyare to be happy in: Where can we live but days?

One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the dame day as we do ourselves.

Here is an unfenced existance

What will survive of us is love.

Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.

I have wished you something None of the others would....

I didn't choose poetry: poetry chose me.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape. It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, Have always known, know that we can't escape, Yet can't accept. One side will have to go. Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring Intricate rented world begins to rouse. The sky is white as clay, with no sun. Work has to be done. Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

A good poem about failure is a success.

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

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.

...the breath that sharpens life is life itself...

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

Something, like nothing, happens anywhere.

There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!

Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.

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

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.

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...

Originality is being different from oneself, not others.

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

Most things may never happen: this one will.

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.

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.

Depression is to me as daffodils were to Wordsworth.

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.

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

Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself

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.

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

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.

Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.

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

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

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.

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?

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

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

Walk with the dead For fear of death.

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

But superstition, like belief, must die...

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, 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

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

Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Any memory for the most part depending on chance.

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

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.

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.

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....

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.

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

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

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

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.'

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

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.

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

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