Top 15 Philip Larkin Quotes

This loss of interest, hair, and enterprise—
Ah, if the game were poker, yes,
You might discard them, draw a full house! But it's chess.

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.

But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another's throats.

They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

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.

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word — the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

Get stewed:
Books are a load of crap.

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.

Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

But superstition, like belief, must die...

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.

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.

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

Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.