110+ Philip Larkin Quotes On Death, Hull And Parents

Philip Larkin was an English poet, novelist, and librarian. He was born in 1922 and is considered one of the most important poets of the 20th century. His poetry is known for its wry and sometimes dark observations on everyday life, often dealing with themes of nostalgia and mortality. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Philip Larkin on love, death, hull.

Top 10 Philip Larkin Quotes

1. Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.
2. I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
3. 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
4. What will survive of us is love.
5. Sexual intercourse began in 1963 ... / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LP
6. Selflessness is like waiting in a hospital In a badly-fitting suit on a cold wet morning. Selfishness is like listening to good jazz With drinks for further orders and a huge fire.
7. 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.
8. One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the dame day as we do ourselves.
9. 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.
10. Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.

Philip Larkin Short Quotes

• Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
• We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.
• Depression is to me as daffodils were to Wordsworth.
• There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
• Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
• You can't put off being young until you retire.
• Since the majority of meRejects the majority of you,Debating ends forthwith, and weDivide.
• All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
• The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
• To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted.

Philip Larkin Quotes About Love

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. — Philip Larkin

I wonder love can have already set In dreams, when we've not met More times than I can number on one hand. — Philip Larkin

In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love. — Philip Larkin

The difficult part of love Is being selfish enough. — Philip Larkin

To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober. — Philip Larkin

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

A good meal can somewhat repair / The eatings of slight love — Philip Larkin

Still, vicious or virtuous, Love suits most of us. — Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin Quotes About Death

Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs: Despite the artful tensions of the calendar, The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites, The costly aversion of the eyes from death- Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs. — Philip Larkin

Walk with the dead For fear of death. — Philip Larkin

Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood. — Philip Larkin

Death: the anaesthetic from which none come round. — Philip Larkin

Death is no different whined at than withstood. — Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin Quotes About Life

Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it. — Philip Larkin

If you tell a novelist, 'Life's not like that', he has to do something about it. The poet simply replies, 'No, but I am.' — Philip Larkin

Clearly money has something to do with life. — Philip Larkin

I have started to say "A quarter of a century" Or "thirty years back" About my own life. — Philip Larkin

You can look out of your life like a train & see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train. — Philip Larkin

Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off? Six days of the week it soils With its sickening poison-- Just for paying a few bills! That's out of proportion. — Philip Larkin

Life is first boredom, then fear. — Philip Larkin

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

Life and literature is a question of what one thrills to, and further than that no man shall ever go without putting his foot in a turd. — Philip Larkin

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. — Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin Quotes About People

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? — Philip Larkin

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can't quite name. — Philip Larkin

I'd like to think...that people in pubs would talk about my poems — Philip Larkin

SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles. — Philip Larkin

Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder. — Philip Larkin

Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself. — Philip Larkin

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

Philip Larkin Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Philip Larkin

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. — Philip Larkin

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. — Philip Larkin

I like spaghetti because you don't have to take your eyes off the book to pick about among it, it's all the same. — Philip Larkin

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 — Philip Larkin

Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past Without a word--the men Leaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriages Lasting a little while longer: Never such innocence again. — Philip Larkin

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. — Philip Larkin

Since the majority of me Rejects the majority of you, Debating ends forthwith, and we Divide.'' Philip Larkin — Philip Larkin

As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief n 'tradition' or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people. — Philip Larkin

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

Sexual intercourse began in 1963 (which was rather late for me) -- Between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP. — Philip Larkin

My mother, who hates thunderstorms,Holds up each summer day and shakesIt out suspiciously, lest swarmsOf grape-dark clouds are lurking there.... — Philip Larkin

Get stewed:Books are a load of crap. — Philip Larkin

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. — Philip Larkin

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

But superstition, like belief, must die. — Philip Larkin

For we have thought the longer thoughtsAnd gone the shorter way.And we have danced to devil's tunesShivering home to pray;I take you now and for always,For always is always now. — Philip Larkin

It is fatal to decide, intellectually, what good poetry is because you are then in honour bound to try to write it, instead of the poems that only you can write. — Philip Larkin

Most things may never happen: this one will. — Philip Larkin

Here is an unfenced existance — Philip Larkin

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

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. — Philip Larkin

But O, Photography! as no art is, Faithful and disappointing! — Philip Larkin

As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like. — Philip Larkin

I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve. — Philip Larkin

I didn't choose poetry: poetry chose me. — Philip Larkin

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

I have wished you something None of the others would. — Philip Larkin

Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork and drive the brute off? — Philip Larkin

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. — Philip Larkin

Saki says that youth is like hors d'oeuvres: you are so busy thinking of the next courses you don't notice it. When you've had them, you wish you'd had more hors d'oeuvres. — Philip Larkin

The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously. — Philip Larkin

Any memory for the most part depending on chance. — Philip Larkin

Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence. — Philip Larkin

One of the sadder things, I think, Is how our birthdays slowly sink: Presents and parties disappear, The cards grow fewer year by year, Till, when one reaches sixty-five, How many care we're still alive? — Philip Larkin

This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood. — Philip Larkin

He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day. — Philip Larkin

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

Many famous feet have trod Sublunary paths, and famous hands have weighed The strength they have against the strength they need; And famous lips interrogated God Concerning franchise in eternity. — Philip Larkin

A good poem about failure is a success. — Philip Larkin

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape. It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, Have always known, know that we can't escape, Yet can't accept. One side will have to go. Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring Intricate rented world begins to rouse. The sky is white as clay, with no sun. Work has to be done. Postmen like doctors go from house to house. — Philip Larkin

Boys dream of native girls who bring breadfruit, Whatever they are. — Philip Larkin

I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day. — Philip Larkin

Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about. — Philip Larkin

I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else. — Philip Larkin

In times when nothing stood but worsened, or grew strange, there was one constant good: she did not change. — Philip Larkin

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are, to recreate the familiar, eternalizing the poet's own perception in unique and original verbal form. — Philip Larkin

I am not sure, once a poet has found out what has been written already, and how it was written - once, in short, he has learnt his trade - that he should bother with literature at all. Poetry is not like surgery, a technique that can be copied. Every operation the poet performs is unique, and need never be done again. — Philip Larkin

Originality is being different from oneself, not others. — Philip Larkin

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. — Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh. — Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said. — Philip Larkin

Nothing, like something, happens anywhere. — Philip Larkin

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow Loosely as cannon-smoke... Is a reminder of the strength and pain Of being young; that it can't come again, But is for others undiminished somewhere. — Philip Larkin

Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments. — Philip Larkin

Heads in the Women's Ward On pillow after pillow lies The wild white hair and staring eyes; Jaws stand open; necks are stretched With every tendon sharply sketched; A bearded mouth talks silently To someone no one else can see. Sixty years ago they smiled At lover, husband, first-born child. Smiles are for youth. For old age come Death's terror and delirium. — Philip Larkin

Give me a thrill, says the reader, Give me a kick; I don't care how you succeed, or What subject you pick. — Philip Larkin

The breath that sharpens life is life itself. — Philip Larkin

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. — Philip Larkin

Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are. — Philip Larkin

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. — Philip Larkin

Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous, Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water, Is earth's most multiple, excited daughter; And those she has least use for see her best, Their paths grown craven and circuitous, Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest. — Philip Larkin

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 a piece of one's experience & set it up on its own, an isolated object never to trouble you again, at least not for a bit. In the absence of this impulse nothing stirs. — Philip Larkin

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. — Philip Larkin

I think we got much better poetry when it was all regarded as sinful or subversive, and you had to hide it under the cushion when somebody came in. — Philip Larkin

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

Parting is a training streamer,Lingering like leaves in autumn. — Philip Larkin

... everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly. — Philip Larkin

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

Life Lessons by Philip Larkin

1. Philip Larkin's poetry often focuses on the ephemeral nature of life and the inevitability of death, teaching us to appreciate the present and make the most of our lives while we can.
2. He also emphasizes the importance of being true to oneself and living authentically, rather than trying to conform to the expectations of society.
3. His work also encourages us to be honest and open with our emotions, and to accept our imperfections and vulnerabilities as part of being human.