Philip Larkin
They say eyes clear with age.Collection: Age
Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.
Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.
Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.
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.
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don't have any kids yourself.
I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any-after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think?
You can't put off being young until you retire.
Above all, though, children are linked to adults by the simple fact that they are in process of turning into them. For this they may be forgiven much. Children are bound to be inferior to adults, or there is no incentive to grow up.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
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.
I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.
You can look out of your life like a train & see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train.Collection: Looks
How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.Collection: Lying
What will survive of us is love.Collection: Romantic
I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.Collection: Enemy
Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance.Collection: Poetry
Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.Collection: Sanity
Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself.Collection: People
As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like.Collection: Children
Sexual intercourse began in 1963 ... / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LPCollection: Firsts
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Art
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 actionCollection: Strong
Originality is being different from oneself, not others.Collection: Being Different
We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.Collection: Be Kind
Depression is to me as daffodils were to Wordsworth.Collection: Depression
He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day.Collection: Marriage
Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.Collection: Writing
When I get sent manuscripts from aspiring poets, I do one of two things: if there is no stamped self-addressed envelope, I throw it into the bin.-If there is, I write and tell them to f**k off.Collection: Writing
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?Collection: Time
A good meal can somewhat repair / The eatings of slight loveCollection: Meals
Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.Collection: Home
Any memory for the most part depending on chance.Collection: Memories
I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.Collection: Thinking
It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.Collection: Kind
One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the dame day as we do ourselves.Collection: Dames
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.Collection: Night
Only in books the flat and final happens, Only in dreams we meet and interlock.Collection: Dream
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go / As if to win them backCollection: Home
Now, helpless in the hollow of An unarmorial age, a trough Of smoke in slow suspended skeins Above their scrap of history, Only an attitude remains: Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone finality They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.Collection: Attitude
Life is first boredom, then fear.Collection: Boredom
I am beginning to think of the human imagination as a fruit machine on which victories are rare and separated by much vain expense, and represent a rare alignment of mental and spiritual qualities that normally are quite at odds.Collection: Spiritual