Philip Larkin - Life Quotes

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

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
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
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
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