Quote

One of the sadder things, I think, Is how our birthdays slowly sink: Presents and parties disappear, The cards grow fewer year by year, Till, when one reaches sixty-five, How many care we're still alive?

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
Think
Five
Aging
Sadder
Thinking
Party
Cards
Reaches
Stills
Till
Presents
Care
Disappear
Sink
Still
Grow
Sixty
Many
Grows
Parties
Years
Alive
Fewer
Things
Year
Slowly
Birthdays

More quotes by Philip Larkin

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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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And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.
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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.
Philip Larkin
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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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My age fallen away like white swaddling Floats in the middle distance, becomes An inhabited cloud.
Philip Larkin
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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.
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Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
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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.
Philip Larkin
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The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
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Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.
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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.
Philip Larkin
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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.
Philip Larkin
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... everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly.
Philip Larkin
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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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We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.
Philip Larkin
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I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.
Philip Larkin
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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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All the unhurried day / Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.
Philip Larkin
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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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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.
Philip Larkin