“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

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It's very strange how often stron…" by Philip Larkin?
Philip Larkin photo
Philip Larkin 42
English poet, novelist, jazz critic and librarian 1922–1985

Related quotes

Prem Rawat photo

“For all of us who are alive, life is the real issue. Yet so often we judge our existence by the things that happen to us—by whether things are going our way or not. Sometimes we feel strong—strong enough to dictate our future. Sometimes we feel that we can make things happen. Then there are times when we feel totally helpless. But through all the dramas and bumps, there is life. There is the very powerful, very existence of every single human being.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Toronto, Ontario, Canada May 27, 1994
1990s

“Must be a strange life these days, for toes. A simple twist of fate and they could have been the big boys, the much-feted opposables, spending their days busy carrying things and controlling machinery and touching interesting parts of people's bodies. They don't get to do any of that. Instead they just get pushed into small, dark leather places and forgotten about, and when they're let free they often seem little more than a strange fringe on the ends of your feet.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Source: The Lonely Dead (2004), Ch. 7

“We are all carrying so many things in our life and inside ourselves. Often it feels there is no place to put them down. Where do you place the questions you carry”

Sabrina Ward Harrison (1975) Canadian writer

Source: Spilling Open: The Art of Becoming Yourself

Paul McCartney photo

“I don't have any desire to learn. I feel it's like a voodoo, that it would spoil things if I actually learnt how things are done.”

Paul McCartney (1942) English singer-songwriter and composer

Of arranging, The Beatles Anthology (2000), p. 175

John Banville photo

“[W]e would probably claim Kafka as an Irish writer. His tone of voice is certainly quite Irish: that sense of melancholy, that sense of strangeness and of being a stranger in the world. I think that we empathise with that very much indeed.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville: claiming Kafka as an Irish writer (2011)

Jane Roberts photo

“It is unfortunately often - but not always - true that individuals who carry strong religious feeling are often bothered more than usual by poor health and personal dilemmas. The fact is that religions have been the carriers of some of the best ideas that man has entertained - but it has also held most stubbornly to the most troublesome concepts that have plagued mankind.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Way Toward Health (1997), p. 310

Jonathan Safran Foer photo

“I don't think that there are any limits to how excellent we could make life seem.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Everything Is Illuminated

Source: Everything Is Illuminated

Elvis Costello photo

“I don't feel any form of music is beyond me in the sense of that I don't understand it or I don't have some love for some part of it.”

Elvis Costello (1954) English singer-songwriter

dig interview (2004)
Context: I don't feel any form of music is beyond me in the sense of that I don't understand it or I don't have some love for some part of it. And if there's something in it that I can respond to, then there's something that I might be able to use as a composer. There are records of mine that have had smaller audiences and have provoked really drastic responses from people — particularly from critics — who maybe don't have quite enough time to live with the record or accept that a piece has its own integrity.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley photo

“How mutable are our feelings, and how strange is that clinging love we have of life even in the excess of misery!”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus

Source: Frankenstein

Ursula K. Le Guin photo

“Unless physical action reflects psychic action, unless the deeds express the person, I get very bored with adventure stories; often it seems that the more action there is, the less happens.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

Introduction to the story “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow” p. 166
Short fiction, The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975)

Related topics