For we have thought the longer thoughts
And gone the shorter way.
And we have danced to devil’s tunes
Shivering home to pray;
I take you now and for always,
For always is always now.
—Philip Larkin
Topics: Commitment
Life has a practice of living you, if you don’t live it.
—Philip Larkin
Topics: Life and Living
Sexual intercourse began in 1963 (which was rather late for me)—Between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP.
—Philip Larkin
Topics: Sex
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?
—Philip Larkin
Topics: Unhappiness
The only way to eliminate unemployment is to eliminate unemployment benefits.
—Philip Larkin
Topics: Work
My mother, who hates thunderstorms,
Holds up each summer day and shakes
It out suspiciously, lest swarms
Of grape-dark clouds are lurking there….
—Philip Larkin
Why should I let the toad work Squat on my life? Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork and drive the brute off?
—Philip Larkin
Topics: Work
Since the majority of me
Rejects the majority of you,
Debating ends forthwith, and we
Divide.
—Philip Larkin
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.
—Philip Larkin
Topics: Children
Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can’t quite name.
—Philip Larkin
Topics: Aging, Age
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.
—Philip Larkin
Topics: Misery, Money
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge English Poet
Percy Bysshe Shelley English Poet
Letitia Elizabeth Landon English Poet, Novelist
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu English Aristocrat, Poet
Algernon Charles Swinburne English Poet
John Masefield English Poet
Francis Thompson English Poet
Edmund Spenser English Poet
Philip James Bailey English Poet
Anne Bradstreet American Poet