66 Notable Quotes By Philip Larkin, The Author Of High Windows
Philip Larkin was an English poet, librarian, novelist and a jazz critic best known for his poems and novels. His first book of poetry was ‘The North Ship’, and two novels named ‘Jill’ and ‘A Girl in Winter’. However, his work gained prominence with a collection of poems ‘The Less Deceived’ which were followed by The ‘Whitsun Weddings’ and ‘High Windows’. Larkin was a graduated from the University of Oxford with English language and Literature. After graduation Larkin became a librarian and worked as the university librarian at the University of Hull. During his tenure as a librarian for 30 years, Larkin produced most of his significant works. He was criticized for including no to minimal feelings in his poems. However, Larkin continued his unique style of poems that were highly structured but surprisingly flexible which he is known for now. Larkin was known for being a no-nonsense, solitary Englishman who disliked fame and had no patience for the rising trend of attracting public attention by other writers of his era. Here are some notable quotes by Philip Larkin.
I have no enemies. But my friends don't like me.
Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off.
What will survive of us is love.
So many things I had thought forgotten Return to my mind with stranger pain: Like letters that arrive addressed to someone Who left the house so many years ago.
How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.
I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.
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.
Originality is being different from oneself, not others.
Something, like nothing, happens anywhere.
On me your voice falls as they say love should, Like an enormous yes.
Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, / Shaped to the comfort of the last to go / As if to win them back
Uncontradicting solitude Supports me on its giant palm; And like a sea-anemone Or simple snail, there cautiously Unfolds, emerges, what I am.
Parents fuck you up. They don't mean to but they do.
Sex means nothing--just the moment of ecstasy, that flares and dies in minutes.
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.
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Since the majority of me Rejects the majority of you, Debating ends forthwith, and we Divide.
Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.
Only in books the flat and final happens, Only in dreams we meet and interlock....
Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.
I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.
Dear, I can't write, it's all a fantasy: a kind of circling obsession.
I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.
...the breath that sharpens life is life itself...
The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow Loosely as cannon-smoke... Is a reminder of the strength and pain Of being young; that it can't come again, But is for others undiminished somewhere.
Most things may never happen: this one will.
There is bad in all good authors: what a pity the converse isn't true!
In times when nothing stood / but worsened, or grew strange / there was one constant good: / she did not change.
Why can't one stop being a son without becoming a father?
Depression hangs over me as if I were Iceland.
