Philip Levine QUOTES

1 " How weightless
words are when nothing will do. "

2 " 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 , 7 Years from Somewhere: Poems

3 " I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life. "

― Philip Levine

4 " … 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

5 " 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

6 " 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 , The Simple Truth

7 " 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 , The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography

8 " The earth drinks all that’s left of you and asks for more. "

― Philip Levine , Breath

9 " 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 , The Simple Truth

10 " 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. "

― Philip Levine , The Simple Truth

11 " To be alone then, hearing only breeze, your own breath rising to answer with words you didn’t know you knew the pale questions of the full moon, to know for the first time you are without a name or number. "

― Philip Levine , Breath

12 " ...with no morning the day is sold. "

― Philip Levine , Not This Pig

13 " Poetry is like truth: on one level it simply is, and as such it is available to anyone. Anyone, that is, who will spend himself or herself to receive it, for no one has an inherent right to truth. One must earn it, and one earns the truth by honoring it, by treasuring it in a thousand daily acts, by shaping one’s life to both give it and receive it. The emperors have their treasures, and we have ours. [Larry] Levis said it perfectly when he spoke in the voice of Whitman, which is the voice of American poetry; ‘To find me now will cost you everything. "

― Philip Levine , My Lost Poets: A Life in Poetry

14 " He embodied what he worshipped, the exquisite in the commonplace…salt for the spirit. "

― Philip Levine , Breath

15 " If you stand / there long enough the air will thicken / with dusk and dust and exhaust / and finally with / a starless dark. The day will become something / it's never been before, something for / which I have no name. "

― Philip Levine , The Last Shift: Poems

16 " I speak to H. in a bar in downtown L.A. Over a schooner of beer he waits out the day "

― Philip Levine , New Selected Poems of Philip Levine

17 " 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

18 " You have begun to separate the dark from the dark. "

― Philip Levine

19 " I find you
in these tears, few,
useless and here at last.
Don't come back. "

― Philip Levine

20 " 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

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