Philip Larkin

“Never such innocence,Never before or since,As changed itself to pastWithout a word--the menLeaving the gardens tidy,The thousands of marriagesLasting a little while longer:Never such innocence again.”

“Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:The sun-comprehending glass,And beyond it, the deep blue air, that showsNothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.”

“I'd like to think...that people in pubs would talk about my poems”

“Only in books the flat and final happens, Only in dreams we meet and interlock....”

“Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off.”

“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.”

“One of the quainter quirks of life is that we shall never know who dies on the same day as we do ourselves.”

“life is first boredom, then fear.whether or not we use it, it goes,and leaves what something hidden from us chose,and age, and then the only end of age.”

“Caught in the center of a soundless fieldWhile hot inexplicable hours go byWhat trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?You seem to ask.I make a sharp reply,Then clean my stick. I'm glad I can't explainJust in what jaws you were to suppurate:You may have thought things would come right againIf you could only keep quite still and wait.”

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

“Empty-page staring again tonight. It's maddening. I suppose people who don't write (like the Connollies) imagine anything that can be though can be expressed. Well, I don't know. I can't do it. It's this sort of thing that makes me belittle the whole business: what's the good of a 'talent' if you can't do it when you want to? What should we think of a woodcarver who couldn't woodcarver? or a pianist who couldn't play the piano? Bah, likewise grrr.”

“When I throw back my head and howlPeople (women mostly) sayBut you've always done what you want, You always get your way- A perfectly vile and foulInversion of all that's been.What the old ratbags meanIs I've never done what I don't.So the shit in the shuttered chateauWho does his five hundred wordsThen parts out the rest of the dayBetween bathing and booze and birdsIs far off as ever, but soIs that spectacled schoolteaching sod(Six kids, and the wife in pod, And her parents coming to stay)...Life is an immobile, locked, Three-handed struggle betweenYour wants, the world's for you, and (worse)The unbeatable slow machineThat brings what you'll get. Blocked, They strain round a hollow stasisOf havings-to, fear, faces.Days sift down it constantly. Years.--The Life with the Hole in It”

“Time has transfigured them intoUntruth. The stone fidelityThey hardly meant has come to beTheir final blazon, and to proveOur almost-instinct almost true:What will survive of us is love.”

“Morning, noon & bloody night,Seven sodding days a week,I slave at filthy WORK, that mightBe done by any book-drunk freak.This goes on until I kick the bucket.FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT FUCK IT”

“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.”

“Most things may never happen: this one will.”

“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.”

“Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.”

“he [Llewelyn Powys] has always in mind the great touchstone Death & consequently life is always judged as how far it fits us, or compensates us, for ultimately dying.”

“What will survive of us is love.”