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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
Settled
Butterfly
Summer
Case
Died
Cases
Rich
Looks
Butterflies

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Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
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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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Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
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Any memory for the most part depending on chance.
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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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There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
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Parting is a training streamer,Lingering like leaves in autumn.
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Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder.
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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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Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
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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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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.
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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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What are days for? Days are where we live.
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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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We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.
Philip Larkin
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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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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
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Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.
Philip Larkin
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I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
Philip Larkin