Top 42 Philip Levine Quotes

#1. My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #9935
#2. No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #31755
#3. My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #55314
#4. As you know, Joyce was a writer who asked his reader to give him a lifetime," he said. "I am that reader, and I can tell you it was a wasted life.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #117803
#5. Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You'll have that readership. Keep going until you know you're doing work that's worthy. And then see what happens. That's my advice.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #141468
#6. How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #218990
#7. Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme ... they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #229273
#8. I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #332073
#9. The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #362884
#10. I say, Father, the years have brought me here, still your son, they have brought me to a life I cannot understand.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #510969
#11. I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #578874
#12. I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #594380
#13. ... the river sliding along its banks, darker now than the sky descending a last time to scatter its diamonds into these black waters that contain the day that passed, the night to come.
- Excerpt from the poem The Mercy

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #598000
#14. Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #628205
#15. My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #685109
#16. Let me begin again as a speck
of dust caught in the night winds
sweeping out to sea. Let me begin
this time knowing the world is
salt water and dark clouds, the world
is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn
comes slowly, and changes nothing.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #695967
#17. I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #714325
#18. For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #768511
#19. If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #823124
#20. Listen to these young poets and you'll discover the voice of the present and hear the voice of the future before the future is even here.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #839378
#21. My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #873251
#22. I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #933190
#23. I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #938273
#24. Oh, yes, let's bless the imagination. It gives us the myths we live by. Let's bless the visionary power of the human - the only animal that's got it - , bless the exact image of your father dead and mine dead, bless the images that stalk the corners of our sight and will not let go.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #964427
#25. I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #981490
#26. It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #987496
#27. I write what's given me to write.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #1070197
#28. But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #1077534
#29. You have to follow where the poem leads. And it will surprise you. It will say things you didn't expect to say. And you look at the poem and you realize, 'That is truly what I felt.' That is truly what I saw.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #1183653
#30. My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #1184053
#31. ...with no morning the day is sold.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #1190232
#32. No one that night turned
into literature, nothing that we did or didn't
entered the mythology of boys growing into men
or girls fighting to be people.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #1200495
#33. If she were writing by candlelight she would now be in the dark, for a living flame would refuse to be fed by such pure exhaustion. Actually she is in the dark, for the

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #1282555
#34. You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #1337685
#35. From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #1381952
#36. Now I must wait and be still and say nothing I don't know, nothing I haven't lived over and over, and that's everything.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #1405122
#37. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary into what it is ... a moment in time; an observed fragment of eternity.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #1409718
#38. Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #1442991
#39. There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #1501930
#40. But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #1651315
#41. I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #1668109
#42. I'm afraid we live at the mercy of a power, maybe a God, without mercy. And yet we find it, as I have, from others.

Philip Levine

Philip Levine Quotes #1853552

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