Quotes from Philip Larkin

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

It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write.

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

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are, to recreate the familiar, eternalizing the poet's own perception in unique and original verbal form.

Many famous feet have trod Sublunary paths, and famous hands have weighed The strength they have against the strength they need; And famous lips interrogated God Concerning franchise in eternity.

... everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly.

Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments.

Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go / As if to win them back

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.

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

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

Life is first boredom, then fear.

If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.'

A good poem about failure is a success.

The breath that sharpens life is life itself.

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

They say eyes clear with age.

This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.

What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. Theyare to be happy in: Where can we live but days?

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.

Clearly money has something to do with life.

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

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