Philip Larkin Quotes

95 Sourced Quotes

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.

Philip Larkin
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?

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

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

Philip Larkin
Life doesn't wait to be asked: it comes grinning in, sits down uninvited and helps itself to bread and cheese, and comments uninhibitedly on the decorations.

Philip Larkin
One of those old-type natural fouled-up guys.

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

Philip Larkin
The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,
Broke out, to show
Its bright incipience sailing above,
Still promising to solve, and satisfy,
And set unchangeably in order. So
To pile them back, to cry,
Was hard, without lamely admitting how
It had not done so then, and could not now.

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

Philip Larkin
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.

Philip Larkin
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

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

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

Philip Larkin
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.

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

Philip Larkin
The diatonic scale is what you use if you want to write a national anthem, or a love song, or a lullaby. The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema at the same time.

Philip Larkin
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.

Philip Larkin
A poem is usually a highly professional artificial thing, a verbal device designed to reproduce a thought or emotion indefinitely: it shd have no dead parts, and every word should be completely unchangeable and unmoveable.

Philip Larkin
- to start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted.

Philip Larkin
I see life more as an affair of solitude diversified by company than an affair of company diversified by solitude.

Philip Larkin
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.

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
The quickest way to start a punch-up between two British literary critics is to ask them what they think of the poems of Sir John Betjeman

Philip Larkin
I search myself for illusions like a monkey looking for fleas.

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

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
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.

Philip Larkin
Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:
'Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
I am all you never had of goods and sex.
You could get them still by writing a few cheques.'

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
And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There'll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.

Philip Larkin