Philip Larkin Quotes & Sayings

“I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any-after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think?”

“Above all, though, children are linked to adults by the simple fact that they are in process of turning into them. For this they may be forgiven much. Children are bound to be inferior to adults, or there is no incentive to grow up.”

“They say eyes clear with age.”

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

“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 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.”

“You can't put off being young until you retire.”

“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.”

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