LarkinQuotes

‘A photograph of Richard Murphy, Terrible Ted Hughes, new star Douglas Dunn & yours truly. A strange study of contrasting personalities.’

The earth is faint, the air is sick.

Most people, I’m convinced, don’t think about life at all. They grab what they think they want and the subsequent consequences keep them busy in an endless chain till they’re carried out feet first.

If we seriously contemplate life it appears an agony too great to be supported, but for the most part our minds gloss such things over & until the ice finally lets us through we skate about merrily enough.

I was glad to get your letter, thinking perhaps you were ill or starving or something.

In fact life generally is quite unacceptable, though I continue to accept it.

I refuse to believe that there is a thing called life, that one can be in or out of touch with. There is only an endless series of events, of which our birth is one & our death another.

Well. I am in my own nook again, my draughty, dingy book-filled flat.

Gold winter sun

Isn’t it all hell? Everyone should be forcibly transplanted to another continent from their family at the age of three.

I usually wind up in the Beverley Arms for tea, not because it's good tea but because I never know where else to go.

Tuesday - is it? No: Wednesday: groogh...

This is the first thing I have understood: Time is the echo of an axe Within a wood.

Bright drops of time, One and two chime

Clothed in cloudless air

The clouds are all home Like driven sheep.

Walking on summer grass beneath the trees

All’s ravelled under the sun by the wind’s blowing.

Dreams before daybreak cannot keep / Their essences, or surely I should rouse / Into a dawn where all that's past seems sleep.

Absolutely nothing happens in my life, except routine work & thinking from time to time I’ve got lung cancer.

All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense Of being in a hurry gone.