Quotes by Philip Larkin

“You cant put off being young until you retire.”

“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.”

“Life has a practice of living you, if you dont live it.”

“I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any-after all, most people are unhappy, dont you think?”

“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.”

“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 cant understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: Its like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.”

“Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.”

“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.”

“Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and dont have any kids yourself.”

“Death is no different whined at than withstood.”

What will survive of us is love.

Time has transfigured them intoUntruth. The stone fidelityThey hardly meant has come to beTheir final blazon, and to proveOur almost-instinct almost true:What will survive of us is love.

Im 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 times - it doesnt of course. It merely adds the torment of having done nothing, when the time comes when it really doesnt matter if youve done anything or not.

I seem to walk on a transparent surface and see beneath me all the bones and wrecks and tentacles that will eventually claim me: in other words, old age, incapacity, loneliness, death of others & myself...

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

he [Llewelyn Powys] has always in mind the great touchstone Death & consequently life is always judged as how far it fits us, or compensates us, for ultimately dying.

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

So many things I had thought forgottenReturn to my mind with stranger pain:Like letters that arrive addressed to someoneWho left the house so many years ago.

Uncontradicting solitudeSupports me on its giant palm;And like a sea-anemoneOr simple snail, there cautiouslyUnfolds, emerges, what I am.