LA Larkin Quotes

Here is an unfenced existance

My mother, who hates thunderstorms, Holds up each summer day and shakes It out suspiciously, lest swarms Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there.

The fate of you, the aristocracy of industry, will be as the fate of the aristocracy of land if you do not show that you have some humanity still among you.

We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.

Something, like nothing, happens anywhere.

I didn't choose poetry: poetry chose me.

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

I'd like to think...that people in pubs would talk about my poems

I have wished you something None of the others would.

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

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

But, o, photography! as no art is,Faithful and disappointing! That recordsDull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,And will not censor blemishes,Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards

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

There must be freedom for all to live, to think, to worship, no book, no avenue must be closed.

The question of religion was a matter for each individual's conscience, and in a great many cases was the outcome of birth or residence in a certain geographical area.

Russia is the only place where men and women can be free.

Humanity abhors, above all things, a vacuum in itself, and your class will be cut off from humanity as the surgeon cuts the cancer and alien growth from the body.

I think we got much better poetry when it was all regarded as sinful or subversive, and you had to hide it under the cushion when somebody came in.

And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.

Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.

I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.

Therefore it is essential that some means should be sought whereby the work of the nation may be carried on without constant yet at present necessary dislocation.

Like the oxytocin you get as a mom makes you forget everything constantly. And I'm a totally different person after having a kid.

The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.

All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.

Uncontradicting solitude Supports me on its giant palm; And like a sea-anemone Or simple snail, there cautiously Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

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

Calmness is a huge gift. And once you master it, you will be able to respond in a useful way to every difficult situation that decides to walk into your heart.

I never stood in a public house bar and alcoholic drink never touched my lips.

I think translation is an impossible job, and I admire the people who do it in a way that brings poetry to us that we wouldn't have access to.

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

The breath that sharpens life is life itself.

In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.

But O, Photography! as no art is, Faithful and disappointing!

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

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

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

By God's help, and the intelligent use of their own strong right arms they could accomplish great things.

I have raised the morals and sobriety of the people.

I am careful about my conduct because I know this cause requires clean men.

It's the sense of walking back into the Garden of Eden or something like that. Where suddenly everything is perfect and you see how you're connected to everything in the world.

You can look out of your life like a train & see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train.

To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted.

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

Parting is a training streamer,Lingering like leaves in autumn.

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.

Most things may never happen: this one will.

Those who want to divide the workers have resorted to the foulest methods.

Claiming for ourselves liberty of conscience, liberty to worship, we shall see to it that every other individual enjoys the same right.

Man must be associated with his fellows.