Quote

I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.

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
Lies
Lying
Art
Think
Thinking
Preserve
Preserves
Impulse
Bottom

More quotes by 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
To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted.
Philip Larkin
Image
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.
Philip Larkin
Image
Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
Philip Larkin
Image
Parting is a training streamer,Lingering like leaves in autumn.
Philip Larkin
Image
The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.
Philip Larkin
Image
Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
Philip Larkin
Image
To write you must be warm, fed, loved and sober.
Philip Larkin
Image
There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
Philip Larkin
Image
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.
Philip Larkin
Image
But, o, photography! as no art is,Faithful and disappointing! That recordsDull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,And will not censor blemishes,Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards
Philip Larkin
Image
Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
Philip Larkin
Image
Life and literature is a question of what one thrills to, and further than that no man shall ever go without putting his foot in a turd.
Philip Larkin
Image
I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.
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
We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.
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
Here silence stands Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends And past the poppies bluish neutral distance Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence: Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
Philip Larkin
Image
Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about.
Philip Larkin
Image
Most people know more as they get older: I give all that the cold shoulder.
Philip Larkin