Quote

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

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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
Ends
Reach
Beach
Weeds
Shingle
Past
Air
Stands
Unnoticed
Bluish
Like
Flower
Heat
Neutral
Thicken
Beyond
Leaves
Neglected
Shingles
Silence
Suddenly
Waters
Ascends
Land
Distance
Facing
Quicken
Existence
Shapes
Weed
Peopled
Water
Sun
Hidden
Poppies
Luminously

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Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
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SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.
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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said.
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Joy Is for the simple or the great to feel, Neither of which we are.
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Any memory for the most part depending on chance.
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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.
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Life is first boredom, then fear.
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Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.
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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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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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... everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly.
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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.
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I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
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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.
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Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.
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Clearly money has something to do with life.
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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.
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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.
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It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.
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The difficult part of love Is being selfish enough.
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