Philip Larkin Quotes

I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.

What will survive of us is love.

How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.

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.

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.

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It's very strange how often strong feelings don't seem to carry any message of action

I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

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.

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 'time's - it doesn't of course. It merely adds the torment of having done nothing, when the time comes when it really doesn't matter if you've done anything or not.