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

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Joy Is for the simple or the great to feel, Neither of which we are.
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Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
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On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.
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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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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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Clearly money has something to do with life.
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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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But, o, photography! as no art is,Faithful and disappointing! That recordsDull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,And will not censor blemishes,Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards
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Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
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A writer once said to me, If you ever go to America, go either to the East Coast or the West Coast: The rest is a desert full of bigots. That's what I think I'd like . . . a version of pastoral.
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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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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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I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.
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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
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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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You can look out of your life like a train & see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train.
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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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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.
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The breath that sharpens life is life itself.
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What are days for? Days are where we live.
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