Philip Larkin Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Joy
Is for the simple or the great to feel,
Neither of which we are. — Philip Larkin

Ought we to smile / Perhaps make friends? No: in the race for seats / You're best alone. Friendship is not worth while. — Philip Larkin

Maturity
A stationary sense ... as, I suppose,
I shall have, till my single body grows
Inaccurate, tired;
Then I shall start to feel the backward pull
Take 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 pantomime
Of compensating act and counter-act,
Defeat and counterfeit, makes up, in fact,
My ablest time. — Philip Larkin

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

Something, like nothing, happens anywhere. — Philip Larkin

The difficult part of love
Is being selfish enough ... — Philip Larkin

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

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

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are. — Philip Larkin

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

One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the same day as we do ourselves. — Philip Larkin

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

It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write. — Philip Larkin

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife. — Philip Larkin

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

Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself. — Philip Larkin

My age fallen away like white swaddling
Floats in the middle distance, becomes
An inhabited cloud. — Philip Larkin

To put one brick upon another,
Add a third, and then a fourth,
Leaves no time to wonder whether
What you do has any worth. — Philip Larkin

Give me a thrill, says the reader,
Give me a kick;
I don't care how you succeed, or
What subject you pick. — Philip Larkin

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

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

It's easy to write when you've nothing to write about
(That is, when you are young) ... — Philip Larkin

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

Clearly money has something to do with life ... — Philip Larkin

Why can't one stop being a son without becoming a father? — Philip Larkin

I was sleeping, and you woke me
To walk on the chilled shore
Of a night with no memory,
Till your voice forsook my ear
Till your two hands withdrew
And I was empty of tears,
On the edge of a bricked and streeted sea
And a cold hill of stars. — Philip Larkin

I am beginning to think of the human imagination as a fruit machine on which victories are rare and separated by much vain expense, and represent a rare alignment of mental and spiritual qualities that normally are quite at odds. — Philip Larkin

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
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

When I get sent manuscripts from aspiring poets, I do one of two things: if there is no stamped self-addressed envelope, I throw it into the bin.-If there is, I write and tell them to f**k off. — Philip Larkin

I suppose if one lives to be old, one's entire waking life will be spent turning on the spit of recollection over the fires of mingled shame, pain or remorse. Cheerful prospect! — Philip Larkin

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

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide — Philip Larkin

Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous,
Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water,
Is earth's most multiple, excited daughter;
And those she has least use for see her best,
Their paths grown craven and circuitous,
Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest. — Philip Larkin

Walk with the dead
For fear of death. — Philip Larkin

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

What will survive of us is love.

- from A Writer — Philip Larkin

Living toys are something novel,
But it soon wears off somehow. — Philip Larkin

What will survive of us is love. — Philip Larkin

They say eyes clear with age. — Philip Larkin

When getting my nose in a book
Cured most things short of school,
It was worth ruining my eyes
To know I could still keep cool,
And deal out the old right hook
To dirty dogs twice my size.
Later, with inch-thick specs,
Evil was just my lark:
Me and my coat and fangs
Had ripping times in the dark.
The women I clubbed with sex!
I broke them up like meringues.
Don't read much now: the dude
Who lets the girl down before
The hero arrives, the chap
Who's yellow and keeps the store
Seem far too familiar. Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.
(A Study Of Reading Habits) — Philip Larkin

I have started to say
"A quarter of a century"
Or "thirty years back"
About my own life. — Philip Larkin

What do they think has happened, the old fools,
To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose
It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools,
And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't remember
Who called this morning? Or that, if they only chose,
They could alter things back to when they danced all night,
Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September?
Or do they fancy there's really been no change,
And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight,
Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming
Watching the light move? If they don't (and they can't), it's strange;
Why aren't they screaming? — Philip Larkin

I came to the conclusion that an enormous amount of research was needed to form an opinion on anything, and therefore abandoned politics altogether as a topic of conversation. — Philip Larkin

In life, as in art, talking vitiates doing. — Philip Larkin

What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. Theyare to be happy in: Where can we live but days? — 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

They mess you up, your Mom and Dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had. And add some extra, just for you — 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? Six days of the week it soils With its sickening poison
Just for paying a few bills! That's out of proportion. — Philip Larkin

Morning, noon & bloody night,
Seven sodding days a week,
I slave at filthy WORK, that might
Be done by any book-drunk freak.
This goes on until I kick the bucket.
FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT — Philip Larkin

I listen to money singing, it's like looking down from long French windows at a provincial town. The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad in the evening sun. It is intensely sad ... — Philip Larkin

Much better stay in company!
To love you must have someone else,
Giving requires a legatee,
Good neighbours need whole parishfuls
Of folk to do it on - in short,
Our virtues are all social; if,
Deprived of solitude, you chafe,
It's clear you're not the virtuous sort. — Philip Larkin

I would not dare
Console you if I could. What can be said,
Except that suffering is exact, but where
Desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic? — Philip Larkin

So many things I had thought forgotten
Return to my mind with stranger pain:
Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago. — 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

Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end. — Philip Larkin

When I throw back my head and howl
People (women mostly) say
But you've always done what you want,
You always get your way
- A perfectly vile and foul
Inversion of all that's been.
What the old ratbags mean
Is I've never done what I don't.

So the shit in the shuttered chateau
Who does his five hundred words
Then parts out the rest of the day
Between bathing and booze and birds
Is far off as ever, but so
Is 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 between
Your wants, the world's for you, and (worse)
The unbeatable slow machine
That brings what you'll get. Blocked,
They strain round a hollow stasis
Of havings-to, fear, faces.
Days sift down it constantly. Years.

--The Life with the Hole in It — Philip Larkin

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

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

There is bad in all good authors — Philip Larkin

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 how
To 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 element
That spreads through other lives like a tree
And sways them on in a sort of sense
And say why it never worked for me.
Something to do with violence
A long way back, and wrong rewards,
And arrogant eternity. — 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

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

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

A good meal can somewhat repair / The eatings of slight love — Philip Larkin

Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it. — 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

Most people know more as they get older:
I give all that the cold shoulder. — Philip Larkin

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach. — Philip Larkin

To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted — Philip Larkin

A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean anything to him. — Philip Larkin

Long Sight In Age
They say eyes clear with age,
As dew clarifies air
To sharpen evenings,
As if time put an edge
Round the last shape of things
To show them there;
The many-levelled trees,
The long soft tides of grass
Wrinkling away the gold
Wind-ridden waves- all these,
They say, come back to focus
As we grow old. — Philip Larkin

Parents fuck you up. They don't mean to but they do. — Philip Larkin

Poetry is emotional in nature and theatrical in operation. — Philip Larkin

Most things may never happen: this one will. — Philip Larkin

I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else, — Philip Larkin

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

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

Mother's electric blanket broke, & I have 'mended' it, so she may be practising suttee involuntarily before long. — Philip Larkin

Time is the echo of an axe
Within a wood. — Philip Larkin

A Writer

'Interesting, but futile,' said his diary,
Where day by day his movements were recorded
And nothing but his loves received inquiry;
He knew, of course, no actions were rewarded,
There were no prizes: though the eye could see
Wide beauty in a motion or a pause,
It need expect no lasting salary
Beyond the bounds' momentary applause.

He lived for years and never was surprised:
A member of his foolish, lying race
Explained away their vices: realised
It was a gift that he possessed alone:
To look the world directly in the face;
The face he did not see to be his own. — 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

He [Llewelyn Powys] has always in mind the great touchstone Death & consequently life is always judged as how far it fits us, or compensates us, for ultimately dying. — Philip Larkin

Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself — Philip Larkin

What one writes is based so much on the kind of person one is, the kind of environment one has had and has now. One doesn't really choose the poetry one writes, one writes the kind of poetry one has to write, or one can write. — Philip Larkin

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

The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously. — Philip Larkin

I am awakened each dawn
Increasingly to fear ... — Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh. — Philip Larkin

Strange to know nothing, never to be sure
Of what is true or right or real,
But forced to qualify or so I feel,
Or Well, it does seem so:
Someone must know.
Strange to be ignorant of the way things work:
Their skill at finding what they need,
Their sense of shape, and punctual spread of seed,
And willingness to change;
Yes, it is strange,
Even to wear such knowledge
for our flesh
Surrounds us with its own decisions
and yet spend all our life on imprecisions,
That when we start to die
Have no idea why. — Philip Larkin

To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober. — Philip Larkin

Often one spends weeks trying to write a poem out of the conscious mind that never comes to anything - these are sort of 'ideal' poems that one feels ought to be written, but don't because (I fancy) they lack the vital spark of self-interest. A 'real' poem is a pleasure to write. — Philip Larkin

The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits. — Philip Larkin

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

I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me. — Philip Larkin

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

Depression is to me as daffodils were to Wordsworth. — Philip Larkin