Philip Larkin Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Philip Larkin
Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

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

Philip Larkin
I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.

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

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

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

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

Philip Larkin
He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philip Larkin
The headed paper, made for writing home (If home existed) letters of exile.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philip Larkin
Weeds are not supposed to grow,
But by degrees
Some achieve a flower, although
No one sees.

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

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

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

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

Philip Larkin