Quotes by Philip Larkin

• 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?
• They say eyes clear with age.
• Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.
• 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.
• Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.
• You can't put off being young until you retire.
• 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.
• Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.
• Death is no different whined at than withstood.
• 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.
• I wouldn't mind seeing China if I could come back the same day.
• 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.
• Happiness is not in another place, but this place... not for another hour, but misunderstood hours like Thur-sday