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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
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

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In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
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Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.
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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
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Parting is a training streamer,Lingering like leaves in autumn.
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Clearly money has something to do with life.
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My age fallen away like white swaddling Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.
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As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like.
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I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.
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What are days for? Days are where we live.
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Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs: Despite the artful tensions of the calendar, The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites, The costly aversion of the eyes from death- Beneath it all, desire of oblivion runs.
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When I get sent manuscripts from aspiring poets, I do one of two things: if there is no stamped self-addressed envelope, I throw it into the bin.-If there is, I write and tell them to f**k off.
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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.
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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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The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
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Any memory for the most part depending on chance.
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Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments.
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.
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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
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I have wished you something None of the others would.
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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.
Philip Larkin