Quotes from Philip Larkin

Morning, noon & bloody night, Seven sodding days a week, I slave at filthy WORK, that might Be done by any book-drunk freak. This goes on until I kick the bucket. FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT

What will survive of us is love. - from A Writer

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

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. from "Why Did I Dream of You Last Night?

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.

Originality is being different from oneself, not others.

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

In everyone there sleeps A sense of life lived according to love. To some it means the difference they could make By loving others, but across most it sweeps, As all they might have done had they been loved. That nothing cures.

Something, like nothing, happens anywhere.

Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.

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.

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

I'm terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I 'do' anything or not. In a way I may believe, deep down, that doing nothing acts as a brake on 'time's - it doesn't of course. It merely adds the torment of having done nothing, when the time comes when it really doesn't matter if you've done anything or not.

On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.

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

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

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

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends; And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence: Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

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

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

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

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.

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