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Philip Larkin Quotes

Philip Arthur Larkin was an English poet, novelist, and librarian. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, followed by two novels, Jill and A Girl in Winter , and he came to prominence in 1955 with the publication of his second collection of poems, The Less Deceived, followed by The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows . He contributed to The Daily Telegraph as its jazz critic from 1961 to 1971, articles gathered in All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–71 , and he edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse . His many honours include the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was offered, but declined, the position of Poet Laureate in 1984, following the death of Sir John Betjeman.

After graduating from Oxford in 1943 with a first in English Language and Literature, Larkin became a librarian. It was during the thirty years he worked with distinction as university librarian at the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull that he produced the greater part of his published work. His poems are marked by what Andrew Motion calls "a very English, glum accuracy” about emotions, places, and relationships, and what Donald Davie described as "lowered sights and diminished expectations". Eric Homberger called him "the saddest heart in the post-war supermarket"—Larkin himself said that deprivation for him was “what daffodils were for Wordsworth”. Influenced by W. H. Auden, W. B. Yeats, and Thomas Hardy, his poems are highly structured but flexible verse forms. They were described by Jean Hartley, the ex-wife of Larkin's publisher George Hartley , as a "piquant mixture of lyricism and discontent", though anthologist Keith Tuma writes that there is more to Larkin's work than its reputation for dour pessimism suggests.Larkin's public persona was that of the no-nonsense, solitary Englishman who disliked fame and had no patience for the trappings of the public literary life. The posthumous publication by Anthony Thwaite in 1992 of his letters triggered controversy about his personal life and political views, described by John Banville as hair-raising, but also in places hilarious. Lisa Jardine called him a "casual, habitual racist, and an easy misogynist", but the academic John Osborne argued in 2008 that "the worst that anyone has discovered about Larkin are some crass letters and a taste for porn softer than what passes for mainstream entertainment". Despite the controversy Larkin was chosen in a 2003 Poetry Book Society survey, almost two decades after his death, as Britain's best-loved poet of the previous 50 years, and in 2008 The Times named him Britain's greatest post-war writer.In 1973 a Coventry Evening Telegraph reviewer referred to Larkin as "the bard of Coventry", but in 2010, 25 years after his death, it was Larkin's adopted home city, Kingston upon Hull, that commemorated him with the Larkin 25 Festival which culminated in the unveiling of a statue of Larkin by Martin Jennings on 2 December 2010, the 25th anniversary of his death. On 2 December 2016, the 31st anniversary of his death, a floor stone memorial for Larkin was unveiled at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. Wikipedia  

✵ 9. August 1922 – 2. December 1985
Philip Larkin photo

Works

The Whitsun Weddings
The Whitsun Weddings
Philip Larkin
The Less Deceived
The Less Deceived
Philip Larkin
High Windows
High Windows
Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin: 42   quotes 2   likes

Famous Philip Larkin Quotes

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

Philip Larkin

“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.”

Philip Larkin

Letter from Belfast ( 5 August 1953) http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.com/2010/10/many-letters-of-philip-larkin.html to Monica Jones
Context: 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.

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

Philip Larkin

Source: Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

“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

Source: Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

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

Philip Larkin

Source: Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

Philip Larkin Quotes about life

“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

Source: Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

“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

“You can look out of your life like a train & see what you're heading for, but you can't stop the train.”

Philip Larkin

Letter to Monica Jones, 22 October 1967

“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.”

Philip Larkin

Letter to J.B.Sutton, 21 December 1942

“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.”

Philip Larkin

Source: Letter to J.B.Sutton 30 October 1949

“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.”

Philip Larkin

Source: "Aubade", Times Literary Supplement, 23 December 1977

Philip Larkin Quotes about love

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

Philip Larkin book The Whitsun Weddings

Source: The Whitsun Weddings

“What will survive of us is love.

- from”

Philip Larkin book The Whitsun Weddings

"An Arundel Tomb" (20 February 1956)
Variant: Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
Source: The Whitsun Weddings (1964)

“The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,
Broke out, to show
Its bright incipience sailing above,
Still promising to solve, and satisfy,
And set unchangeably in order. So
To pile them back, to cry,
Was hard, without lamely admitting how
It had not done so then, and could not now.”

Philip Larkin book The Whitsun Weddings

"Love Songs in Age" (1 January 1957)
The Whitsun Weddings (1964)

Philip Larkin Quotes

“You know I don’t care at all for politics, intelligently.”

Philip Larkin

Letter from Belfast ( 5 August 1953) http://fridaynightboys300.blogspot.com/2010/10/many-letters-of-philip-larkin.html to Monica Jones
Context: 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.

Intelligence

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

Philip Larkin

Required Writing-Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982 Farrar Strauss 1984
Context: 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.

“The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.”

Philip Larkin

"The Mower," Humberside (Hull Literary Club magazine) (Autumn 1979) [12 June 1979]

Death , Time

“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.”

Philip Larkin

Letter to Monica Jones (1 November 1951) as quoted in "Philip Larkin's women" (23 October 2010) http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/oct/23/martin-amis-philip-larkin-letters-monica
Context: 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.

Sex , Thinking

“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
Pain , Housing

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

Philip Larkin

Source: Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

“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
Understanding , Sleep , Universe

“Something, like nothing, happens anywhere.”

Philip Larkin

“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

Source: Collected Poems

Support , Solitude , Sea

“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”

Philip Larkin
Sadness , Home

“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 book High Windows

Source: High Windows

Sun

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

Philip Larkin

Interview with Miriam Gross, "A voice for our time" in The Observer (16 December 1979); republished in Required Writing: Miscellaneous Pieces, 1955-1982 (1983)

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

Philip Larkin

Source: Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

“I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.”

Philip Larkin

Source: Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

People , Feeling , Reading

“You have to distinguish between things that seemed odd when they were new but are now quite familiar, such as Ibsen and Wagner, and things that seemed crazy when they were new and seem crazy now, like 'Finnegans Wake' and Picasso.”

Philip Larkin

“Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.”

Philip Larkin book The Less Deceived

Next, Please
The Less Deceived (1955)

Silence , Water

“What was the rock my gliding childhood struck, / And what bright unreal path has led me here?”

Philip Larkin

Lines from an early poem, letter to J.B. Sutton, 16 April 1941

Childhood

“Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.”

Philip Larkin book The Whitsun Weddings

"A Study of Reading Habits" (20 August 1960)
The Whitsun Weddings (1964)

Books

“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 book The Whitsun Weddings

"MCMXIV"
The Whitsun Weddings (1964)

Men , Marriage , Change , Past

“But, o, photography! as no art is,
Faithful and disappointing! That records
Dull days as dull, and hold-it smiles as frauds,
And will not censor blemishes,
Like washing-lines, and Hall's-Distemper boards”

Philip Larkin book The Less Deceived

Source: The Less Deceived (1955), Lines on a Young Lady's Photograph Album

Faith , Smile , Art , Disappointment

“And I, whose childhood
Is a forgotten boredom,
Feel like a child
Who comes on a scene
Of adult reconciling,
And can understand nothing
But the unusual laughter,
And starts to be happy.”

Philip Larkin book The Less Deceived

Coming
The Less Deceived (1955)

Feeling , Understanding , Laughter , Childhood

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

Philip Larkin

Letter to Winifred Arnott, 7 October 1953

Feeling

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

Philip Larkin

Interview in The Review, published by Ian Hamilton (1972)

Thinking

“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 book High Windows

"This Be The Verse," High Windows (1974) [April ? 1971]
This Be The Verse (1974)

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