Philip Larkin: Quotes about life

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

Philip Larkin: 84 quotes2 likes

“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.”

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.”

“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.”

Source: Philip Larkin: Letters to Monica

“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.”

Letter to J.B.Sutton, 21 December 1942

“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

“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.”

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.”

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