Philip Larkin Quotes

Life is a stream On which we strew Petal by petal the flower of our heart; The end lost in dream, They float past our view, We only watch their glad, early start. Freighted with hope, Crimsoned with joy, We scatter the leaves of our opening rose; Their widening scope, Their distant employ, We never shall know. And the stream as it flows Sweeps them away, Each one is gone Ever beyond into infinite ways. We alone stay While years hurry on, The flower fared forth, though its fragrance still stays.

While the flowers, pale and unreal in the moonlight, floated away upon the river; and thus do greater things that once were in our breasts, and near our hearts, flow from us to the eternal sea.

And, as always happens, and happens far too soon, the strange and wonderful becomes a memory and a memory becomes a dream. Tomorrow it's gone.

She wondered if all the firsts in her life would go by so quickly, and be forgotten just as quickly.

A memory from my youth comes back to me. You go into the woods on a bike, with a girl. There is the smell of heather, you can hear the wind in the fir trees, you don't dare tell her about your love, but you feel happy, as if you were floating above the ground. Then you look at the clouds beyond the trees and they are fleeting. And you know that within an hour you'll have to go home, that tomorrow will be a working day. You wish you could stop that moment forever, but you can't, it is bound to end. So you take a photo, as if to challenge time.

And we'll never be as young as we are right now

The days of wine and roses laugh and run away like a child at playThrough the meadow land toward a closing doorA door marked "nevermore" that wasn't there before

Youth passes like a dream.

We need to be reminded sometimes that a sunrise last but a few minutes. But its beauty can burn in our hearts eternally.

Reflect, ere you spurn me, that youth at his sides Wears wings; and once gone, all pursuit he derides.

All those years and their moments— Crackling bacon, slamming car doors, Poems tried out on friends, Will be one more archive, One more shaky text.

We have some salt of our youth in us.

The languor of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost!

Youth is still where you left it, and that's where it should stay. Anything that was worth taking on life's journey, you'll already have taken with you.

Try to hold on to youth and it mocks you while it sprints away.

These happy golden years are passing by, these happy golden years.

And one day we will die and our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea. But for now we are young; let us lay in the sun and count every beautiful thing we can see.

There rises the moon, broad and tranquil, through the branches of a walnut tree on a hill opposite. I apostrophize it in the words of Faust; "O gentle moon, that lookest for the last time upon my agonies!" --or something to that effect.

The things that have been and shall be no more, The things that are, and that hereafter shall be, The things that might have been, and yet were not, The fading twilight of joys departed.

But pleasures are like poppies spread, You seize the flower, it's bloom is shed; Or, like the snow-fall in the river, A moment white, then melts forever.

I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more /the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort /to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires /and expires, too soon, too soon /before life itself

By the time I recognize this moment, this moment will be gone. . . But I will bend the light, pretend that it somehow lingered on

I know the best moments can never be captured on film, even as I spend nearly half my life trying to do just that.

Only to youth will spring be spring.

They know these mornings well and love them desperately because they cannot last - these people who know that nothing lasts.