Philip Larkin

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do.”

“What will survive of us is love.”

“Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) - between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP.”

“Life is first boredom, then fear.”

“Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf.”

“Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.”

“The trees are coming into leaf like something almost being said.”

“I want to see them, albums of my own life, that I have never seen.”

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.”

“Home is so sad. It stays as it was left, shaped to the comfort of the last to go.”

“I see life more as an affair of endurance than of triumph.”

“Never turn down a chance to have sex or be on television.”

“Where can we live but days?”

“How little our careers express what lies in us, and yet how much time they take up.”

“It's unhappiness that provokes a poem.”

“Life has a practice of living you, if you don't live it.”