Quote

Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs: Despite the artful tensions of the calendar, The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites, The costly aversion of the eyes from death- Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.

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
Life
Tension
Calendars
Solitude
Rite
Despite
Costly
Eyes
Aversion
Artful
Eye
Oblivion
Rites
Desire
Insurance
Tensions
Death
Beneath
Calendar
Running
Runs
Fertility

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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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The breath that sharpens life is life itself.
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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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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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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.
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Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
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As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like.
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To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted.
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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
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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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Parting is a training streamer,Lingering like leaves in autumn.
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My age fallen away like white swaddling Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.
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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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Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go / As if to win them back
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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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One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
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I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
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There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
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And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.
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He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day.
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