Quote

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

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Philip Larkin
Age: 63 †
Born: 1922
Born: August 9
Died: 1985
Died: December 2
Critic
Journalist
Librarian
Music Critic
Music Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Coventry
England
UK
Philip Arthur Larkin
Love
Prove
Finals
Untruth
Attitude
Slow
Scrap
Almost
Survive
Suspended
Age
Smoke
Hollow
History
Instinct
Helpless
True
Stones
Hardly
Transfigured
Come
Meant
Stone
Trough
Time
Remains
Final
Finality

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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.
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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said.
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In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
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Life is first boredom, then fear.
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... everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly.
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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.
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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.
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I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
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Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.
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Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.
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Joy Is for the simple or the great to feel, Neither of which we are.
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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.
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He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day.
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SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.
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One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the dame day as we do ourselves.
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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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The difficult part of love Is being selfish enough.
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This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.
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I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.
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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.
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