Philip Larkin Quotes

94 quotes in 1151 categories

• 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…
• Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.
• And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.
• Get stewed:Books are a load of crap.
• Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
• Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
• 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…
• The poetic impulse is distinct from ideas about things or feelings about things, though it may use these. It's more like a desire to separate…
• One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the dame day as we do ourselves.
• To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted
• Death is no different whined at than withstood.
• 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.
• Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.
• It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.
• Death: the anaesthetic from which none come round.
• 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…
• They say eyes clear with age.
• Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
• Sexual intercourse began in 1963 ... / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LP
• 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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