Philip Larkin
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"Philip Arthur Larkin", Order of the Companions of Honour/CH, Order of the British Empire/CBE, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature/FRSL was an English poet, novelist, and librarian. His first book of poetry, The North Ship, was published in 1945, followed by two novels, Jill (novel)/Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947), and he came to prominence in 1955 with the publication of his second collection of poems, The Less Deceived, followed by The Whitsun Weddings (1964) and High Windows (1974). He contributed to The Daily Telegraph as its jazz critic from 1961 to 1971, articles gathered in All What Jazz: A Record Diary 1961–71 (1985), and he edited The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1973). His many honours include the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. He was offered, but declined, the position of Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom/Poet Laureate in 1984, following the death of John Betjeman.

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In everyone there sleeps / A sense of life lived according to love. / To some it means the difference they could make / By loving others, but across most it sweeps / As all they might have done had they been loved. / That nothing cures.

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

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Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.

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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.

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I can't understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems: It's like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

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I think writing about unhappiness is probably the source of my popularity, if I have any-after all, most people are unhappy, don't you think?

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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.

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Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.

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