16 Philip Larkin Quotes

Philip Larkin quotes

1. Get stewed: Books are a load of crap.

2. They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.

3. The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind While there is still time.

4. Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

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

2. 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.

3. And immediately 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.

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

5. Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It's terrible the way we scotch silence & solitude at every turn, quite suicidal. I can't see how to avoid it, without being very rich or very unpopular, & it does worry me, for time is slipping by , and nothing is done. It isn't as if anything was gained by this social frivolity, It isn't: it's just a waste.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. But superstition, like belief, must die.

9. Any memory for the most part depending on chance.

10. A writer can have only one language, if language is going to mean anything to him.

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

12. And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.