Philip Larkin Quotes - Page 3

I wonder love can have already set In dreams, when we've not met More times than I can number on one hand.

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.

One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the dame day as we do ourselves.

Boys dream of native girls who bring breadfruit, Whatever they are.

No one can tear your thread out of himself. No one can tie you down or set you free.

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?

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

Only in books the flat and final happens, Only in dreams we meet and interlock.

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.

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.

Life is first boredom, then fear.

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.

Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about.

Above all, though, children are linked to adults by the simple fact that they are in process of turning into them. For this they may be forgiven much. Children are bound to be inferior to adults, or there is no incentive to grow up.

I have wished you something None of the others would.

Here is an unfenced existance

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.

I like spaghetti because you don't have to take your eyes off the book to pick about among it, it's all the same.

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.

Novels seem to me to be richer, broader, deeper, more enjoyable than poems.

I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.

To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted.

What are days for? Days are where we live.

Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.