Philip Larkin
35 quotes
Biography
"So many things I had thought forgottenReturn to my mind with stranger pain:Like letters that arrive addressed to someoneWho left the house so many years ago."
"Uncontradicting solitudeSupports me on its giant palm;And like a sea-anemoneOr simple snail, there cautiouslyUnfolds, 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 showsNothing, and is nowhere, and is endless."
"Life and literature is a question of what one thrills to, and further than that no man shall ever go without putting his foot in a turd."
"If we seriously contemplate life it appears an agony too great to be supported, but for the most part our minds gloss such things over & until the ice finally lets us through we skate about merrily enough. Most people, I'm convinced, don't think about life at all. They grab what they think they want and the subsequent consequences keep them busy in an endless chain till they're carried out feet first."
"I think ... someone might do a little research on some of the inherent qualities of sex – its cruelty, its bullyingness, for instance. It seems to me that bending someone else to your will is the very stuff of sex, by force or neglect if you are male, by spitefulness or nagging or scenes if you are female. And what's more, both sides would sooner have it that way than not at all. I wouldn't. And I suspect that means not that I can enjoy sex in my own quiet way but that I can't enjoy it at all. It's like rugby football: either you like kicking & being kicked, or your soul cringes away from the whole affair. There's no way of quietly enjoying rugby football."
"You know I don’t care at all for politics, intelligently. I found that at school when we argued all we did was repeat the stuff we had, respectively, learnt from the Worker, the Herald, Peace News, the Right Book Club (that was me, incidentally: I knew these dictators, Marching Spain, I can remember them now) and as they all contradicted each other all we did was get annoyed. I came to the conclusion that an enormous amount of research was needed to form an opinion on anything, & therefore I abandoned politics altogether as a topic of conversation. It’s true that the writers I grew up to admire were either non-political or Left-wing, & that I couldn’t find any Right-wing writer worthy of respect, but of course most of the ones I admired were awful fools or somewhat fakey, so I don’t know if my prejudice for the Left takes its origin there or not. But if you annoy me by speaking your mind in the other interest, it’s not because I feel sacred things are being mocked but because I can’t reply, not (as usual) knowing enough. ... By the way, of course I’m terribly conventional, by necessity! Anyone afraid to say boo to a goose is conventional."
"To start at a new place is always to feel incompetent & unwanted."
"You can look out of your life like a train & see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train."
"I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals."
"The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse —The good not done, the love not given, time Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climb Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; But at the total emptiness for ever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true."
"The first day after a death, the new absence Is always the same; we should be carefulOf each other, we should be kind While there is still time."
"Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth."
"Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are, to recreate the familiar, eternalizing the poet's own perception in unique and original verbal form."
"Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique."
"But superstition, like belief, must die..."
"Nothing, like something, happens anywhere."
"Reprinted reviews are not, as a rule, easily acceptable, but this book of jazz criticism by a distinguished poet is a different case. For a start, the writing is as crisp as you might expect and the pieces, within their small compass, are beautifully shaped."
"He believes the classic age was the 1920s and 1930s, an unfashionable view although I happen to share it. His great hero is Sidney Bechet, the soprano saxophonist, but his admiration in this area is widespread and he even allows white players other than Bix into his pantheon, another heresy."
"His general thesis, a return to the human values of early jazz, is acceptable enough, but the waspish relish with which he attacks everything outside his own tastes is hysterical and in the end alienating, even to those of us who more or less agree with him."
"They say eyes clear with age."
"Time has transfigured them intoUntruth. The stone fidelityThey hardly meant has come to beTheir final blazon, and to proveOur almost-instinct almost true:What will survive of us is love."
"Only in books the flat and final happens, Only in dreams we meet and interlock...."
"Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off."
"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."