Quote

It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.

Philip Larkin

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Still
Find
Unkind
Kind
Untrue
Becomes
Words
Difficult
True
Stills

More quotes by Philip Larkin

Image
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.
Philip Larkin
Image
SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.
Philip Larkin
Image
Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
Philip Larkin
Image
What are days for? Days are where we live.
Philip Larkin
Image
You can look out of your life like a train & see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train.
Philip Larkin
Image
I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
Philip Larkin
Image
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.
Philip Larkin
Image
Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
Philip Larkin
Image
Uncontradicting solitude Supports me on its giant palm And like a sea-anemone Or simple snail, there cautiously Unfolds, emerges, what I am.
Philip Larkin
Image
Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about.
Philip Larkin
Image
On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.
Philip Larkin
Image
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
Image
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.
Philip Larkin
Image
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.
Philip Larkin
Image
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.
Philip Larkin
Image
Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
Philip Larkin
Image
One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the dame day as we do ourselves.
Philip Larkin
Image
When I get sent manuscripts from aspiring poets, I do one of two things: if there is no stamped self-addressed envelope, I throw it into the bin.-If there is, I write and tell them to f**k off.
Philip Larkin
Image
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
Image
Sexual intercourse began in 1963 ... / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LP
Philip Larkin