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My age fallen away like white swaddling Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.

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
Becomes
Middle
Inhabited
Age
Floats
White
Cloud
Away
Aging
Like
Fallen
Clouds
Distance

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What are days for? Days are where we live.
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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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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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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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And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.
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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.
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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.
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... everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly.
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I don't think I write well - just better than anyone else.
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Many famous feet have trod Sublunary paths, and famous hands have weighed The strength they have against the strength they need And famous lips interrogated God Concerning franchise in eternity.
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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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Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
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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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He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day.
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Living in England has no such excuse: These are my customs and establishments.
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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.
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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.
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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
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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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