Quote

Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off? Six days of the week it soils With its sickening poison-- Just for paying a few bills! That's out of proportion.

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
Days
Paying
Soils
Use
Poison
Sickening
Work
Proportion
Toad
Life
Soil
Toads
Bills
Squat
Drive
Brute
Six
Brutes
Pitchfork
Week
Wit
Pitchforks

More quotes by 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
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
My age fallen away like white swaddling Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.
Philip Larkin
Image
Uncontradicting solitude Supports me on its giant palm And like a sea-anemone Or simple snail, there cautiously Unfolds, emerges, what I am.
Philip Larkin
Image
One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
Philip Larkin
Image
The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
Philip Larkin
Image
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
Image
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Philip Larkin
Image
Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
Philip Larkin
Image
Parting is a training streamer,Lingering like leaves in autumn.
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
Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
Philip Larkin
Image
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
Image
In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
Philip Larkin
Image
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.
Philip Larkin
Image
You can look out of your life like a train & see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train.
Philip Larkin
Image
I have wished you something None of the others would.
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
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.
Philip Larkin
Image
Joy Is for the simple or the great to feel, Neither of which we are.
Philip Larkin