Philip Larkin Quotes (32 Quotes)

She was too good for this life.

Only the young can be alone freely.

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.

Half life is over now,
And I meet full face on dark mornings
The bestial visor, bent in
By the blows of what happened to happen.

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

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

And this must be the prime of life.

Friendship is not worth while.

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

Sexual intercourse began in 1963 (which was rather late for me) -- Between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP.

When he came back
He said the horses were restless, and I was sad
That any man or beast that night should lack
The happiness I had.

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

Life is first boredom, then fear.

Why did I dream of you last night?

I dream about that sometimes-and wake up screaming. With any luck they'll pass me over.

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.

Above all, though, children are linked to adults by the simple fact that they are in process of turning into them. For this they may be forgiven much. Children are bound to be inferior to adults, or there is no incentive to grow up.

You can't put off being young until you retire.

Admitted: and the pain is real.

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

Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.

Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Get stewed; Books are a load of crap.

Man hands on misery to man.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

So are their separate ways
Of building, benediction,
Measuring love and money
Ways of slow dying.

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.

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?

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.

Far too many relied on the classic formula of a beginning, a muddle, and an end.

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.

They say eyes clear with age.