Top 42 Philip Levine Quotes
#1. My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.
Philip Levine
#2. No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.
Philip Levine
#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
#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
#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
#6. How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.
Philip Levine
#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
#8. I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.
Philip Levine
#9. The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
Philip Levine
#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
#11. I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.
Philip Levine
#12. I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.
Philip Levine
#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
#14. Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.
Philip Levine
#15. My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.
Philip Levine
#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
#17. I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.
Philip Levine
#18. For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.
Philip Levine
#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
#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
#21. My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
Philip Levine
#22. I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.
Philip Levine
#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
#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
#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
#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
#28. But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.
Philip Levine
#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
#30. My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.
Philip Levine
#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
#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
#34. You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.
Philip Levine
#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
#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
#37. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary into what it is ... a moment in time; an observed fragment of eternity.
Philip Levine
#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
#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
#40. But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.
Philip Levine
#41. I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.
Philip Levine
#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
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