Philip Larkin Quotes

95 Sourced Quotes

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

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.

Philip Larkin
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.

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.

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

Philip Larkin
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.

Philip Larkin
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.

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

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

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.

Philip Larkin
I am afraid the compulsion to write poems left me about seven years ago, since when I have written virtually nothing. Naturally this is a disappointment, but I would sooner write no poems than bad poems.

Philip Larkin
Weeds are not supposed to grow,
But by degrees
Some achieve a flower, although
No one sees.

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

Philip Larkin
Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.

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.

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

Philip Larkin
I think … someone might do a little research on some of the inherent qualities of sex – its cruelty, its bullyingness, for instance. It seems to me that bending someone else to your will is the very stuff of sex, by force or neglect if you are male, by spitefulness or nagging or scenes if you are female. And what's more, both sides would sooner have it that way than not at all. I wouldn't. And I suspect that means not that I can enjoy sex in my own quiet way but that I can't enjoy it at all. It's like rugby football: either you like kicking & being kicked, or your soul cringes away from the whole affair. There's no way of quietly enjoying rugby football.

Philip Larkin
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

Philip Larkin
If I were called in To construct a religion I should make use of water.

Philip Larkin
The realization that it was not people I disliked but children was for me one of those celebrated moments of revelation.
On growing up

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

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

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.

Philip Larkin
The headed paper, made for writing home (If home existed) letters of exile.

Philip Larkin
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

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

Philip Larkin
And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.

Philip Larkin
The adjective 'modern', when applied to any branch of art, means 'designed to evoke incomprehension, anger, boredom or laughter'.

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

Philip Larkin
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.

Philip Larkin