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

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
Impulse
Bottom
Lies
Lying
Art
Think
Thinking
Preserve
Preserves

More quotes by Philip Larkin

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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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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 work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
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What are days for? Days are where we live.
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Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
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I have wished you something None of the others would.
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Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about.
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Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
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Clearly money has something to do with life.
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Still, vicious or virtuous, Love suits most of us.
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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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Uncontradicting solitude Supports me on its giant palm And like a sea-anemone Or simple snail, there cautiously Unfolds, emerges, what I am.
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Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
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Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.
Philip Larkin
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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.
Philip Larkin
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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.
Philip Larkin
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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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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
Philip Larkin
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In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
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.
Philip Larkin