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Top Philip Larkin Quotes

Browse top 89 most favorite famous quotes and sayings by Philip Larkin.

Favorite Philip Larkin Quotes

1. "I have wished you something None of the others would...." ~ Philip Larkin
2. "It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind." ~ Philip Larkin
3. "I work all day, and get half drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain edges will grow light. Till then I see what's really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die." ~ Philip Larkin
4. "Love We Must PartLove, we must part now: do not let it beCalamitous and bitter. In the pastThere has been too much moonlight and self-pity:Let us have done with it: for now at lastNever has sun more boldly paced the sky,Never were hearts more eager to be free,To kick down worlds, lash forests; you and INo longer hold them; we are husks, that seeThe grain going forward to a different use.There is regret. Always, there is regret.But it is better that our lives unloose,As two tall ships, wind-mastered, wet with light,Break from an estuary with their courses set,And waving part, and waving drop from sight." ~ Philip Larkin
5. "Life is slow dying." ~ Philip Larkin
6. "Dear Mr Larkin, I expect you think it's jolly cheeky for a schoolgirl to -Dear Dr Larkin, My freind [sic] and I had an argument as to which of us has the biggest breasts and we wondered if you would act as - My youngest, she's fourteen and quite absurdly stuck on your poems - but then she's advanced in all ways - refuses to wear a -" ~ Philip Larkin
7. "Earth never grieves, I thought, walking across the park, watching seagulls cruising greedily above the ground looking for heaven knows what. Don't you think it's a good line? A very good line" ~ Philip Larkin
8. "...he [Samuel Butler] made a practise of doing the forks last when washing up, on the grounds that he might die before he got to them. This is very much his principle of 'eating the grapes downwards', so that however many grapes you have eaten the next is always the best of the remainder." ~ Philip Larkin
9. "Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it." ~ Philip Larkin
10. "It's funny: one starts off thinking one is shrinkingly sensitive & intelligent & always one down & all the rest of it: then at thirty one finds one is a great clumping brute, incapable of appreciating anything finer than a kiss or a kick, roaring our one's hypocrisies at the top of one's voice, thick skinned as a rhino. At least I do." ~ Philip Larkin
11. "How hard it is, to be forced to the conclusion that people should be, nine tenths of the time, left alone! - When there is that in me that longs for absolute commitment. One of the poem-ideas I had was that one could respect only the people who knew that cups had to be washed up and put away after drinking, and knew that a Monday of work follows a Sunday in the water meadows, and that old age with its distorting-mirror memories follows youth and its raw pleasures, but that it's quite impossible to love such people, for what we want in love is release from our beliefs, not confirmation in them. That is where the 'courage of love' comes in - to have the courage to commit yourself to something you don't believe, because it is what - for the moment, anyway - thrills your by its audacity. (Some of the phrasing of this is odd, but it would make a good poem if it had any words...)" ~ Philip Larkin
12. "The poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It's more like a desire to separate a piece of one's experience & set it up on its own, an isolated object never to trouble you again, at least not for a bit. In the absence of this impulse nothing stirs." ~ Philip Larkin
13. "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
14. "There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!" ~ Philip Larkin
15. "Since the majority of me Rejects the majority of you, Debating ends forthwith, and we Divide.'' Philip Larkin" ~ Philip Larkin
16. "I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It's very strange how often strong feelings don't seem to carry any message of action" ~ Philip Larkin
17. "The way the moon dashes through clouds that blowLoosely as cannon-smoke...Is a reminder of the strength and painOf being young; that it can't come again,But is for others undiminished somewhere." ~ Philip Larkin
18. "The trees are coming into leafLike something almost being said;The recent buds relax and spread,Their greenness is a kind of grief.Is it that they are born againAnd we grow old? No, they die too.Their yearly trick of looking newIs written down in rings of grain.Yet still the unresting castles threshIn fullgrown thickness every May.Last year is dead, they seem to say,Begin afresh, afresh, afresh." ~ Philip Larkin
19. "Next, PleaseAlways too eager for the future, wePick up bad habits of expectancy.Something is always approaching; every dayTill then we say,Watching from a bluff the tiny, clearSparkling armada of promises draw near.How slow they are! And how much time they waste,Refusing to make haste!Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalksOf disappointment, for, though nothing balksEach big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked,Each rope distinct,Flagged, and the figurehead with golden titsArching our way, it never anchors; it'sNo sooner present than it turns to past.Right to the lastWe think each one will heave to and unloadAll good into our lives, all we are owedFor waiting so devoutly and so long.But we are wrong:Only one ship is seeking us, a black-Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her backA huge and birdless silence. In her wakeNo waters breed or break." ~ Philip Larkin
20. "...men whose first coronary is coming like Christmas; who drift, loaded helplessly with commitments and obligations and necessary observances, into the darkening avenues of age and incapacity, deserted by everything that once made life sweet. These I have tried to remind of the excitement of jazz and tell where it may still be found." ~ Philip Larkin
21. "MaturityA stationary sense . . . as, I suppose,I shall have, till my single body grows        Inaccurate, tired;Then I shall start to feel the backward pullTake over, sickening and masterful —         Some say, desired.And this must be the prime of life . . . I blink,As if at pain; for it is pain, to think        This pantomimeOf compensating act and counter-act,Defeat and counterfeit, makes up, in fact,        My ablest time." ~ Philip Larkin
22. "If I looked into your face / expecting a word or a laugh on the old conditions, / it would not be a friend who met my eye" ~ Philip Larkin
23. "Mother's electric blanket broke, & I have 'mended' it, so she may be practising suttee involuntarily before long." ~ Philip Larkin
24. "I was sleeping, and you woke meTo walk on the chilled shoreOf a night with no memory,Till your voice forsook my earTill your two hands withdrewAnd I was empty of tears,On the edge of a bricked and streeted seaAnd a cold hill of stars." ~ Philip Larkin
25. "A good meal can somewhat repair / The eatings of slight love" ~ Philip Larkin
26. "I really am going to meet Forster: I thought I shouldn't, but apparently the old boy E.M.F. is saying with remembered my name & I am bid to John Hewitt's at 8 tomorrow. Shall I ask him if he's a homo? It's the only thing I really want to know about him, you see. I don't even care why he packed up writing." ~ Philip Larkin
27. "I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others & myself..." ~ Philip Larkin
28. "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
29. "So many things I had thought forgottenReturn to my mind with stranger pain:Like letters that arrive addressed to someoneWho left the house so many years ago." ~ Philip Larkin
30. "You know, I know I should be just as panicky as you about the filthy work - one wants to do nothing in the evenings, certainly not spread rotten books around & dredge for a 'line'. It must be like still being a student, with an essay to do after a week's drinking, only you haven't had the drinking. Quite clearly, to me, you aren't a voluntary worker, from the will: you do it by intuitive flashes, more like an act of creation, & when the flashes don't come, as of course they don't, especially when the excess energy of undergraduate days is gone, then it is a hideous unnatural effort." ~ Philip Larkin
31. "Here is an unfenced existance" ~ Philip Larkin
32. "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
33. "Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth." ~ Philip Larkin
34. "Nothing, like something, happens anywhere." ~ Philip Larkin
35. "You can't put off being young until you retire." ~ Philip Larkin
36. "Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP." ~ Philip Larkin
37. "Morning, noon & bloody night,Seven sodding days a week,I slave at filthy WORK, that mightBe done by any book-drunk freak.This goes on until I kick the bucket.FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT" ~ Philip Larkin
38. "I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me." ~ Philip Larkin
39. "Originality is being different from oneself, not others." ~ Philip Larkin
40. "On me your voice falls as they say love should,Like an enormous yes." ~ Philip Larkin
41. "Parents fuck you up. They don't mean to but they do." ~ Philip Larkin
42. "Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It's terrible the way we scotch silence & solitude at every turn, quite suicidal." ~ Philip Larkin
43. "When I throw back my head and howlPeople (women mostly) sayBut you've always done what you want, You always get your way- A perfectly vile and foulInversion of all that's been.What the old ratbags meanIs I've never done what I don't.So the shit in the shuttered chateauWho does his five hundred wordsThen parts out the rest of the dayBetween bathing and booze and birdsIs far off as ever, but soIs that spectacled schoolteaching sod(Six kids, and the wife in pod, And her parents coming to stay)...Life is an immobile, locked, Three-handed struggle betweenYour wants, the world's for you, and (worse)The unbeatable slow machineThat brings what you'll get. Blocked, They strain round a hollow stasisOf havings-to, fear, faces.Days sift down it constantly. Years.--The Life with the Hole in It" ~ Philip Larkin
44. "Time has transfigured them intoUntruth. The stone fidelityThey hardly meant has come to beTheir final blazon, and to proveOur almost-instinct almost true:What will survive of us is love." ~ Philip Larkin
45. "Never such innocence,Never before or since,As changed itself to pastWithout a word--the menLeaving the gardens tidy,The thousands of marriagesLasting a little while longer:Never such innocence again." ~ Philip Larkin
46. "Work is a kind of vacuum, an emptiness, where I just switch off everything except the scant intelligence necessary to keep me going. God, the people are awful - great carved monstrosities from the sponge-stone of secondratedness. Hideous." ~ Philip Larkin
47. "SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles." ~ Philip Larkin
48. "You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso." ~ Philip Larkin
49. "Love again: wanking at ten past three(Surely he's taken her home by now?), The bedroom hot as a bakery, The drink gone dead, without showing howTo meet tomorrow, and afterwards, And the usual pain, like dysentery.Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt, Someone else drowned in that lash-wide stare, And me supposed to be ignorant, Or find it funny, or not to care, Even ... but why put it into words?Isolate rather this elementThat spreads through other lives like a treeAnd sways them on in a sort of senseAnd say why it never worked for me.Something to do with violenceA long way back, and wrong rewards, And arrogant eternity." ~ Philip Larkin
50. "...the breath that sharpens life is life itself..." ~ Philip Larkin
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Sookie," Eric said. I didn't think he'd heard a word. "Yield to me."Well, that was pretty direct."
Author: Charlaine Harris

What Did Philip Larkin Talk About?

Thin
Hen
Ear
Wit
Here
Hey
Old
Thou
King
Con
End
Ten
Pen
Act
Word
Ring
Though
Sin
Ways
Self
Ours
She
Low
Ought
Words
Use
Lit
May
Mean
Star
Rest
Mind
Tan
Sea
Boo
Ears
Lie
Rent
Sing
Ally
Off
Again
Last
Less
Turn
Win
Grow
Book
Die
Pain

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