Philip Larkin - Time Quotes

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

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

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

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
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