Quote

I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.

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
Individual
Never
Think
Poems
Thinking
Separate
Individuals
Scene
Poetry
Written

More quotes by Philip Larkin

Image
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
Image
As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn't like.
Philip Larkin
Image
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
Image
The difficult part of love Is being selfish enough.
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
What are days for? Days are where we live.
Philip Larkin
Image
My age fallen away like white swaddling Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.
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
One of the great criticisms of poets of the past is that they said one thing and did another.
Philip Larkin
Image
Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.
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
Joy Is for the simple or the great to feel, Neither of which we are.
Philip Larkin
Image
The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said.
Philip Larkin
Image
Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
Philip Larkin
Image
I am awakened each dawn Increasingly to fear.
Philip Larkin
Image
Sexual intercourse began in 1963 ... / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LP
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
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
Image
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
Image
Get stewed:Books are a load of crap.
Philip Larkin