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Age
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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
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Children
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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
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Commitment
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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, Is it for now or for always?
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Differences
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Since the majority of me
Rejects the majority of you,
Debating ends forthwith, and we
Divide.
-Philip Larkin
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Life
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Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.
-Philip Larkin
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Money
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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
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Sex
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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
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Thunderstorms
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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
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Work
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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
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Books by and about Philip Larkin