Philip Larkin Quotes

95 Sourced Quotes

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

Philip Larkin
What was the rock my gliding childhood struck, / And what bright unreal path has led me here?'

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

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
We had the old crow over at Hull recently, looking like a Christmas present from Easter Island.
Of Ted Hughes

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

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

Philip Larkin
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.

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

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

Philip Larkin
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?

Philip Larkin
Poetry = heightened talking. Novel = heightened story. Painting = a heightened seeing.

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

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

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.

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

Philip Larkin
But, o, photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing! That records
Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,
And will not censor blemishes,
Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards

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

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 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
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