Philip Larkin Quotes

The difficult part of love Is being selfish enough.

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

I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.

Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her backA huge and birdless silence. In her wakeNo waters breed or break.

Any memory for the most part depending on chance.

But superstition, like belief, must die.

Get stewed:Books are a load of crap.

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

Walk with the dead For fear of death.

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.

life is first boredom, then fear.whether or not we use it, it goes, and leaves what something hidden from us chose, and age, and then the only end of age.

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')

Time has transfigured them intoUntruth. The stone fidelityThey hardly meant has come to beTheir final blazon, and to proveOur almost-instinct almost true:What will survive of us is love.

So many things I had thought forgottenReturn to my mind with stranger pain:Like letters that arrive addressed to someoneWho left the house so many years ago.

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that showsNothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

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

Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to pastWithout a word--the menLeaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriagesLasting a little while longer:Never such innocence again.

We should be carefulOf each other, we should be kindWhile there is still time

I have wished you something None of the others would....