Philip Larkin

“What will survive of us is love. - from A Writer”

“Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off.”

“Morning, noon & bloody night, Seven sodding days a week, I slave at filthy WORK, that might Be done by any book-drunk freak. This goes on until I kick the bucket. FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUC...”

“So many things I had thought forgotten Return to my mind with stranger pain: Like letters that arrive addressed to someone Who left the house so many years ago.”

“Uncontradicting solitude Supports me on its giant palm; And like a sea-anemone Or simple snail, there cautiously Unfolds, emerges, what I am.”

“Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.”

“Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken, Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken, Luminously-peopled air ascends; And past the poppies bluish...”

“Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone fidelity 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...”

“Always too eager for the future, we Pick up bad habits of expectancy. Something is always approaching; every day Till then we say, Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear, Sparkling armada of...”

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

“What do they think has happened, the old fools, To make them like this ? Do they somehow suppose It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools And you keep on pissing yourself, an...”

“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.”

“When I throw back my head and howl People (women mostly) say But you've always done what you want, You always get your way - A perfectly vile and foul Inversion of all that's been. What the...”

“Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.”

“Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.”

“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.”

“There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!”

“Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three (Which was rather late for me) between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP.”

“What do they think has happened, the old fools, To make them like this? Do they somehow suppose It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools, And you keep on pissing yourself, an...”

“I'm terrified of the thought of time passing (or whatever is meant by that phrase) whether I 'do' anything or not. In a way I may believe, deep down, that doing nothing acts as a brake on 't...”