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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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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
Careful
Stills
Still
Kind
Time

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Still, vicious or virtuous, Love suits most of us.
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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said.
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Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
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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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I have wished you something None of the others would.
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The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.
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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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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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There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
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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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I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.
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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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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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What are days for? Days are where we live.
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My age fallen away like white swaddling Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.
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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.
Philip Larkin
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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
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Give me a thrill, says the reader, Give me a kick I don't care how you succeed, or What subject you pick.
Philip Larkin
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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.
Philip Larkin
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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.
Philip Larkin