Philip Larkin Quotations | Page 2

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.

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

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

What are days for? Days are where we live.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Get stewed:Books are a load of crap.

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.

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

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

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

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

Death: the anaesthetic from which none come round.

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.

They say eyes clear with age.

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

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

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

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