Philip Larkin Quotes

95 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

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

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

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

Philip Larkin
Everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly.

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

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

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.

Philip Larkin
I am beginning to think of the creative 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.

Philip Larkin
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare
Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can't come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.

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

Philip Larkin
I thought of London spread out in the sun,
Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat.

Philip Larkin
The notion of expressing sentiments in short lines having similar sounds at their ends seems as remote as mangoes on the moon.

Philip Larkin
Give me your arm, old toad;
Help me down Cemetery Road.

Philip Larkin
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.

Philip Larkin
I have just farted with the sound of an iron ruler twanging in a desk-lid and the smell of a west wind over a decaying patch of red cabbages.

Philip Larkin
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?

Philip Larkin
Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms
Inside your head, and people in them, acting.
People you know, yet can't quite name.

Philip Larkin
The only way of getting shut of your family is to put your neck into the noose of another one. Such is nature's abhorrence of a vacuum.

Philip Larkin
Marriage, well. I think of it as a marvellous thing for other people, like going to the stake.

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

Philip Larkin
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) —
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

Philip Larkin
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.

Philip Larkin
Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
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.

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

Philip Larkin
I have no ideas about poetry at all. For me, a poem is the crossroads of my thoughts, my feelings, my imaginings, my wishes, and my verbal sense: normally these run parallel; often two or more cross; but only when all cross at one point do you get a poem.

Philip Larkin
Sexual intercourse: always disappointing and often repulsive, like asking someone else to blow your own nose for you.

Philip Larkin