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

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

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I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else.
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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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I am awakened each dawn Increasingly to fear.
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Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
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Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance.
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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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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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This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe within a wood.
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Clearly money has something to do with life.
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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.
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The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said.
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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.
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... everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly.
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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
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To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted.
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He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day.
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Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
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Life is first boredom, then fear.
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Still, vicious or virtuous, Love suits most of us.
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