Top 70 Philip Larkin Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “What will survive of us is love.”

— Philip Larkin

Featured in: Romantic Quotes

2. “I have no enemies. But my friends don’t like me.”

— Philip Larkin

3. “What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. Theyare to be happy in: Where can we live but days?”

— Philip Larkin

4. “Poetry should begin with emotion in the poet, and end with the same emotion in the reader. The poem is simply the instrument of transferance.”

— Philip Larkin

5. “A good poem about failure is a success.”

— Philip Larkin

6. “Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, and don’t have any kids yourself.”

— Philip Larkin

7. “Originality is being different from oneself, not others.”

— Philip Larkin

8. “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.”

— Philip Larkin

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

— Philip Larkin

10. “He married a woman to stop her getting away Now she’s there all day.”

— Philip Larkin

11. “Most things may never happen: this one will.”

— Philip Larkin

12. “And immediately 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.”

— Philip Larkin

13. “Only one ship is seeking us, a black-Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her backA huge and birdless silence. In her wakeNo waters breed or break.”

— Philip Larkin

14. “As a child, I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn’t like.”

— Philip Larkin

15. “Poetry is an affair of sanity, of seeing things as they are.”

— Philip Larkin

16. “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.”

— Philip Larkin

17. “The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.”

— Philip Larkin

18. “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.”

— Philip Larkin

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

— Philip Larkin

20. “Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.”

— Philip Larkin

21. “On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.”

— Philip Larkin

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

— Philip Larkin

23. “Death: the anaesthetic from which none come round.”

— Philip Larkin

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

— Philip Larkin

25. “Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.”

— Philip Larkin

26. “I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any – after all, most people are unhappy, don’t you think?”

— Philip Larkin

27. “They say eyes clear with age.”

— Philip Larkin

28. “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.”

— Philip Larkin

29. “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.”

— Philip Larkin

30. “Novels are about other people and poems are about yourself.”

— Philip Larkin

31. “Something, like nothing, happens anywhere.”

— Philip Larkin

32. “Here is an unfenced existance.”

— Philip Larkin

33. “I never think of poetry or the poetry scene, only separate poems written by individuals.”

— Philip Larkin

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

— Philip Larkin

35. “Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork And drive the brute off? Six days of the week it soils With its sickening poison – Just for paying a few bills! That’s out of proportion.”

— Philip Larkin

36. “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.”

— Philip Larkin

37. “I think that at the bottom of all art lies the impulse to preserve.”

— Philip Larkin

38. “Many modern novels have a beginning, a muddle and an end.”

— Philip Larkin

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

— Philip Larkin

40. “You can’t put off being young until you retire.”

— Philip Larkin

41. “Never such innocence, Never before or since, As changed itself to past Without a word – the men Leaving the gardens tidy, The thousands of marriages Lasting a little while longer: Never such innocence again.”

— Philip Larkin

42. “But superstition, like belief, must die...”

— Philip Larkin

43. “The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.”

— Philip Larkin

44. “I listen to money singing, it’s like looking down from long French windows at a provincial town. The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad in the evening sun. It is intensely sad...”

— Philip Larkin

45. “I wouldn’t mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.”

— Philip Larkin

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

— Philip Larkin

47. “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.”

— Philip Larkin

48. “And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.”

— Philip Larkin

49. “Any memory for the most part depending on chance.”

— Philip Larkin

50. “Clearly money has something to do with life...”

— Philip Larkin