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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.

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
Open
Mind
Like
Unhurried
Drawer
Drawers
Knives
Lays

More quotes by Philip Larkin

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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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SEX is designed for people who like overcoming obstacles.
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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.
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It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind.
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Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.
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Joy Is for the simple or the great to feel, Neither of which we are.
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I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else.
Philip Larkin
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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.
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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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.
Philip Larkin
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Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.
Philip Larkin
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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
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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.
Philip Larkin
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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
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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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In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
Philip Larkin
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Parting is a training streamer,Lingering like leaves in autumn.
Philip Larkin
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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
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Any memory for the most part depending on chance.
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