I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.
Philip LarkinHow hard it is, to be forced to the conclusion that people should be, nine tenths of the time, left alone! - When there is that in me that longs for absolute commitment. One of the poem-ideas I had was that one could respect only the people who knew that cups had to be washed up and put away after drinking, and knew that a Monday of work follows a Sunday in the water meadows, and that old age with its distorting-mirror memories follows youth and its raw pleasures, but that it's quite impossible to love such people, for what we want in love is release from our beliefs, not confirmation in them. That is where the 'courage of love' comes in - to have the courage to commit yourself to something you don't believe, because it is what - for the moment, anyway - thrills your by its audacity. (Some of the phrasing of this is odd, but it would make a good poem if it had any words...)
Philip LarkinTags: love poetry youth courage
I really am going to meet Forster: I thought I shouldn't, but apparently the old boy E.M.F. is saying with remembered my name
Philip LarkinTags: forster
Seriously, I think it is a grave fault in life that so much time is wasted in social matters, because it not only takes up time when you might be doing individual private things, but it prevents you storing up the psychic energy that can then be released to create art or whatever it is. It's terrible the way we scotch silence
Philip LarkinTags: art energy solitude socialising
he [Llewelyn Powys] has always in mind the great touchstone Death
Philip LarkinTags: death
It's funny: one starts off thinking one is shrinkingly sensitive
Philip LarkinTags: maturity
How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up. It's sad, really.
Philip LarkinBirthdays are a time when one stock takes, which means, I suppose, a good spineless mope: I scan my horizon and can discern no sail of hope along my own particular ambition. I tell you what it is: I'm quite in accord with the people who enquire 'What is the matter with the man?' because I don't seem to be producing anything as the years pass but rank self indulgence. You know that my sole ambition, officially at any rate, was to write poems
Philip LarkinWork is a kind of vacuum, an emptiness, where I just switch off everything except the scant intelligence necessary to keep me going. God, the people are awful - great carved monstrosities from the sponge-stone of secondratedness. Hideous.
Philip LarkinTags: work
In life, as in art, talking vitiates doing.
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