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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

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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
Feet
Concerning
Path
Paths
Hands
Famous
Need
Lips
Many
Greatness
Interrogated
Needs
Eternity
Trod
Fame
Weighed
Strength
Franchise

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There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
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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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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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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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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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Any memory for the most part depending on chance.
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What are days for? Days are where we live.
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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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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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In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.
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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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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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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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Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about.
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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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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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We should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.
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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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I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
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He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she's there all day.
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