Philip Larkin, Philip Larkin: Letters To Monica Quotes

How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.

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.

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.

I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.

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

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

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

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

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.

In life, as in art, talking vitiates doing.

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.

I had a moral tutor, but never saw him (the only words of his I remember are 'The three pleasures of life -drinking, smoking, and masturbation')