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The difficult part of love Is being selfish enough.

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
Enough
Love
Selfishness
Selfish
Difficult
Part

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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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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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Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.
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The breath that sharpens life is life itself.
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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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On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.
Philip Larkin
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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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The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
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Sexual intercourse began in 1963 ... / Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ and the Beatles first LP
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Clearly money has something to do with life.
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I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.
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Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
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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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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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Give me a thrill, says the reader, Give me a kick I don't care how you succeed, or What subject you pick.
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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.
Philip Larkin
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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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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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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
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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
Philip Larkin