'Don't judge me by them. Some are better than me, but I add up to more than they do'
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Card 7
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'Larkin presents himself as a skeptical, less deceived observer of contemporary life'
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Card 8
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'Let me remember that the only married state I know (i.e that of my parents) is bloody hell. Never must it be forgotten'
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Card 9
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Larkin's collection presents 'a poetry from which even people who distrust poetry, most people, can take comfort and delight'
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Card 10
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Larkin produced 'the most technically brilliant and resonantly beautiful, profoundly disturbing yet appealing and approachable, body of verse of any English poet in the last 25 years'
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Card 11
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Poetry reflects the dreariness of postwar provincial England and voices 'most articulately and poignantly the spiritual desolation of a world in which men have shed the last rags of religious faith that once meant meaning and hope to human lives'
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Card 12
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Larkin wrote 'in clipped, lucid stanzas, about the failures and remorse of age, about stunted lives and spoiled desires'
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Card 13
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Larkin was 'the saddest heart of the post-war supermarket'
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Card 14
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"[he writes] like something almost being said...it is a study of self-pity"
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Card 15
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'I must... sit down on a lonely rock and contemplate glittering loneliness. Marriage... is impossible if one wants to do this'
