Quotes by Philip Larkin
They say eyes clear with age.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.
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.
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.
Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.
Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.
The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.
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.
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?
Far too many relied on the classic formula of a beginning, a muddle, and an end.
I dream about that sometimes-and wake up screaming. With any luck they'll pass me over.
I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.
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.
Choice of you shuts up that peacock-fan The future was, in which temptingly spread All that elaborative nature can.
I cannot halt The tread, the beat of it, it is my own heart,...
Clearly money has something to do with life....
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare....
I thought all girls the same, but yes, You bag real birds, though they're from alien covers.
Living toys are something novel, But it soon wears off somehow....
For (as you will guess) it was death I had in mind; Who covets our breath, who seeks and will always find;...
Over the threshold Nothing like death stepped, nothing like death paused,...
For sometimes it is shown to me in dreams The Eden that all wish to recreate...
To me this decaying landscape has its uses: To make me remember, who am always inclined to forget,...
The walking of girls' vulnerable feet, The heart in its own endless silence kneeling.
