Philip Larkin: Quotes about love

Philip Larkin was English poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian. Explore interesting quotes on love.
Philip Larkin: 84 quotes2 likes

“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)

“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

“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)

“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