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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

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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
Art
Feel
Feels
Children
Thing
Life
Preserve
Preserves
Artist

More quotes by Philip Larkin

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What are days for? Days are where we live.
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The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
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Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
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In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
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Parting is a training streamer,Lingering like leaves in autumn.
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There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
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You can look out of your life like a train & see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train.
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I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
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I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.
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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.
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Life is first boredom, then fear.
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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.
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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.
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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
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On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.
Philip Larkin
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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.
Philip Larkin
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I am awakened each dawn Increasingly to fear.
Philip Larkin
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Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about.
Philip Larkin
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He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day.
Philip Larkin