Philip Larkin: Likeness

Philip Larkin was English poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.

Philip Larkin: 84 quotes2 likes

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

“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.”

“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.”

“Something, like nothing, happens anywhere.”

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

Source: Collected Poems

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

Philip Larkin book The Whitsun Weddings

Source: The Whitsun Weddings

“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.”

“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

“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)

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

Letter to Monica Jones, 22 October 1967

“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)