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And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.

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
Butterfly
Summer
Case
Died
Cases
Rich
Looks
Butterflies
Settled

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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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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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Uncontradicting solitude Supports me on its giant palm And like a sea-anemone Or simple snail, there cautiously Unfolds, emerges, what I am.
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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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He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day.
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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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There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
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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 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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I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
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A writer once said to me, If you ever go to America, go either to the East Coast or the West Coast: The rest is a desert full of bigots. That's what I think I'd like . . . a version of pastoral.
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Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about.
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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.
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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.
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... everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly.
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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said.
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Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
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Any memory for the most part depending on chance.
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Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.
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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.
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