Top 77 Denise Levertov Quotes
#1. I love Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. I also love more cerebral poets like H.D. and Emily Dickinson. My parents subscribed to a monthly poetry periodical, and as a teenager I was introduced to Denise Levertov, who was an influence.
Francesca Lia Block
#2. What I heard was my whole self saying and singing what it knew: I can.
Denise Levertov
#3. There is no savor more sweet, more salt than to be glad to be what, woman, and who, myself, I am ...
Denise Levertov
#4. Wear scarlet! Tear the green lemons
off the tree! I don't want
to forget who I am, what has burned in me,
and hang limp and clean, an empty dress -
Denise Levertov
#5. In June the bush we call
alder was heavy, listless,
its leaves studded with galls,
growing wherever we didn't
want it.
Denise Levertov
#6. When he opens his eyes he gives to what he gazes at the recognition no look ever before granted it. It becomes a word.
Denise Levertov
#8. Peace as a positive condition of society, not merely as an interim between wars, is something so unknown that it casts no images on the mind's screen.
Denise Levertov
#9. Among a hundred windows shining
dully in the vast side
of greater-than-palace number such-and-such
one burns
these several years, each night
as if the room within were aflame.
Denise Levertov
#10. Let the space under the first storey be dark, let the water
lap the stone posts, and vivid green slime glimmer
upon them; let a boat be kept there.
Denise Levertov
#11. Nd as you read
the sea is turning its dark pages,
turning
its dark pages.
Denise Levertov
#12. So absolute, it is
no other than
happiness itself, a breathing
too quiet to hear.
Denise Levertov
#13. Praise
the invisible sun burning beyond
the white cold sky, giving us
light and the chimney's shadow.
Denise Levertov
#14. There's in my mind a ...
turbulent moon-ridden girl
or old woman, or both,
dressed in opals and rags, feathers
and torn taffeta,
who knows strange songs
but she is not kind.
Denise Levertov
#15. The AvowalAs swimmers dareto lie face to the skyand water bears them,as hawks rest upon airand air sustains them;so would I learn to attain freefall, and floatinto Creator Spirit's deep embrace,knowing no effort earnsthat all-surrounding grace.
Denise Levertov
#16. In the dark I rest,
unready for the light which dawns
day after day,
eager to be shared.
Black silk, shelter me.
I need
more of the night before I open
eyes and heart
to illumination. I must still
grow in the dark like a root
not ready, not ready at all.
Denise Levertov
#17. Do you mistake me?
I am speaking of living,
of moving from one moment into
the next, and into the
one after, breathing
death in the spring air ...
Denise Levertov
#18. Love is a landscape the long mountains
define but don't
shut off from the
unseeable distance.
Denise Levertov
#19. The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion ... elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant.
Denise Levertov
#20. Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering.
Denise Levertov
#21. My pleasure
was in the strength of my back,
in my noble shoulders, the cool
smooth flesh cylinders of my arms.
Denise Levertov
#22. Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies ...
Denise Levertov
#23. We are so many
and many within themselves
travel to far islands but no one
asks for their story ...
Denise Levertov
#24. Both art and faith are dependent on imagination; both are ventures into the unknown.
Denise Levertov
#25. Mediocrity is perhaps due not so much to lack of imagination as to lack of faith in the imagination, lack of the capacity for this abandon.
Denise Levertov
#26. It is fatal to one's artistic life to talk about something this is in process.
Denise Levertov
#27. I watch the clouds as I see them
in pomp advancing, pursuing
the fallen sun.
Denise Levertov
#28. What joy when the insouciant
armadillo glances at us and doesn't
quicken his trotting
across the track into the palm brush.
What is this joy? That no animal
falters, but knows what it must do?
Denise Levertov
#29. Very few people really see things unless they've had someone in early life who made them look at things. And name them too. But the looking is primary, the focus.
Denise Levertov
#30. But we have only begun to love the earth. We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life. How could we tire of hope?-so much is in bud.
Denise Levertov
#31. I learn to affirm
Truth's light at strange turns of the mind's road,
wrong turns that lead
over the border into wonder ...
Denise Levertov
#32. At Delphi I prayed
to Apollo
that he maintain in me
the flame of the poem
and I drank of the brackish
spring there ...
Denise Levertov
#33. The vast silence of Buddha overtakes
and overrules the oncoming roar
of tragic life that fills alleys and avenues;
it blocks the way of pedicabs, police, convoys.
Denise Levertov
#34. Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.
Denise Levertov
#35. Each part
of speech a spark
awaiting redemption, each
a virtue, a power
in abeyance ...
Denise Levertov
#36. But for us the road unfurls itself, we don't stop walking, we know there is far to go.
Denise Levertov
#37. Death and pain dominate this world, for though many are cured, they leave still weak, still tremulous, still knowing mortality has whispered to them; have seen in the folding of white bedspreads according to rule the starched pleats of a shroud.
Denise Levertov
#38. Don't eat
those nice green dollars your wife
gives you for breakfast.
Denise Levertov
#39. You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night.
Denise Levertov
#41. Slowly the pale
dew-beads of light
lapped up from flowers
can thicken,
darken to gold:
honey of the human.
Denise Levertov
#42. Beespittle, droppings, hairs
of beefur: all become honey.
Virulent micro-organisms cannot
survive in honey.
Denise Levertov
#43. Blue bead on the wick,
there's that in me that
burns and chills, blackening
my heart with its soot,
I think sometimes not Apollo heard me
but a different god.
Denise Levertov
#45. I like to find what's not found at once, but lies within something of another nature, in repose, distinct.
Denise Levertov
#47. If woman is inconstant, good, I am faithful to ebb and flow, I fall in season and now is a time of ripening.
Denise Levertov
#48. Nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.
Denise Levertov
#49. I am, a shadow
that grows longer as the sun
moves, drawn out
on a thread of wonder.
If I bear burdens
they begin to be remembered
as gifts, goods, a basket
of bread that hurts
my shoulders but closes me
in fragrance. I can
eat as I go.
("Stepping Westward")
Denise Levertov
#50. The last cobwebs
of fog in the
black firtrees are flakes
of white ash in the world's hearth.
Denise Levertov
#51. Teachers at all levels encourage the idea that you have to talk about things in order to understand them, because they wouldn't have jobs, otherwise. But it's phony, you know.
Denise Levertov
#53. A blind man. I can stare at him
ashamed, shameless. Or does he know it?
No, he is in a great solitude.
O, strange joy,
to gaze my fill at a stranger's face.
No, my thirst is greater than before.
Denise Levertov
#54. You have come to the shore. There are no instructions.
Denise Levertov
#55. I believe every space and comma is a living part of the poem and has its function, just as every muscle and pore of the body has its function. And the way the lines are broken is a functioning part essential to the life of the poem.
Denise Levertov
#56. One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language.
Denise Levertov
#58. In city, in suburb, in forest, no way to stretch out the arms - so if you would grow, go straight up or deep down.
Denise Levertov
#59. Affliction is more apt to suffocate the imagination than to stimulate it.
Denise Levertov
#60. Marvelous Truth, confront us at every turn, in every guise.
Denise Levertov
#61. We call it "Nature"; only reluctantly admitting ourselves to be "Nature" too.
Denise Levertov
#62. Grey is the price
of neighboring with eagles, of knowing
a mountain's vast presence, seen or unseen.
Denise Levertov
#65. Through the hollow globe, a ring
of frayed rusty scrapiron,
is it the sea that shines?
Is it a road at the world's edge?
Denise Levertov
#66. I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer.
Denise Levertov
#67. It's when we face for a moment the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know the taint in our own selves, that awe cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart.
Denise Levertov
#69. Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak
of our own doubts, while dubiously
we mother man in his doubt!
Denise Levertov
#70. The fire in leaf and grass so green it seems each summer the last summer.
Denise Levertov
#71. And our dreams,
with what frivolity we have pared them
like toenails, clipped them like ends of
split hair.
Denise Levertov
#72. The stairway is not
a thing of gleaming strands
a radiant evanescence
for angels' feet that only glance in their tread, and need not
touch the stone.
Denise Levertov
#73. Rain-diamonds, this winter morning, embellish the tangle of unpruned pear-tree twigs; each solitaire, placed, it appears, with considered judgement, bears the light beneath the rifted clouds - the invisible shared out in endless abundance.
Denise Levertov
#74. An awe so quiet I don't know when it began.
A gratitude had begun to sing in me.
Was there some moment dividing song from no song?
When does dewfall begin?
When does night fold its arms over our hearts to cherish them?
When is daybreak?
Denise Levertov
#75. Two girls discover the secret of life
in a sudden line of poetry.
Denise Levertov
#76. We have the words in our pockets,
obscure directions. The old ones
have taken away the light of their presence ...
Denise Levertov
#77. Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.
Denise Levertov
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