Philip Larkin Quotes
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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.
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Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.
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Life and literature is a question of what one thrills to, and further than that no man shall ever go without putting his foot in a turd.
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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said.
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A good poem about failure is a success.
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So many things I had thought forgotten Return to my mind with stranger pain: Like letters that arrive addressed to someone Who left the house so many years ago.
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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
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Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs: Despite the artful tensions of the calendar, The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites, The costly aversion of the eyes from death- Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.
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What are days for? Days are where we live.
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As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief n 'tradition' or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people.
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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.
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I think a young poet, or an old poet, for that matter, should try to produce something that pleases himself personally, not only when he's written it but a couple of weeks later. Then he should see if it pleases anyone else, by sending it to the kind of magazine he likes reading.
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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
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Get stewed:Books are a load of crap.
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I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
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This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.
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I wonder love can have already set In dreams, when we've not met More times than I can number on one hand.
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Only in books the flat and final happens, Only in dreams we meet and interlock.
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The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.
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I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.
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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.
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I have wished you something None of the others would.
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In times when nothing stood but worsened, or grew strange, there was one constant good: she did not change.
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Still, vicious or virtuous, Love suits most of us.
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Uncontradicting solitude Supports me on its giant palm; And like a sea-anemone Or simple snail, there cautiously Unfolds, emerges, what I am.
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Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments.
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Life is first boredom, then fear.
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My age fallen away like white swaddling Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.
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There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
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I am awakened each dawn Increasingly to fear.
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