Denise Levertov quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Denise Levertov

Denise Levertov Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Denise Levertov on Wise Famous Quotes.

We are so many
and many within themselves
travel to far islands but no one
asks for their story ...

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.

Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak
of our own doubts, while dubiously
we mother man in his doubt!

Affliction is more apt to suffocate the imagination than to stimulate it.

The fire in leaf and grass so green it seems each summer the last summer.

When he opens his eyes he gives to what he gazes at the recognition no look ever before granted it. It becomes a word.

Don't eat
those nice green dollars your wife
gives you for breakfast.

The last cobwebs
of fog in the
black firtrees are flakes
of white ash in the world's hearth.

I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer.

There comes a time when only anger is love.

Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies ...

Each part
of speech a spark
awaiting redemption, each
a virtue, a power
in abeyance ...

Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering.

We must breathe time as fishes breathe water.

In city, in suburb, in forest, no way to stretch out the arms - so if you would grow, go straight up or deep down.

So absolute, it is
no other than
happiness itself, a breathing
too quiet to hear.

Love is a landscape the long mountains
define but don't
shut off from the
unseeable distance.

I like to find what's not found at once, but lies within something of another nature, in repose, distinct.

There is no savor more sweet, more salt than to be glad to be what, woman, and who, myself, I am ...

The world is not with us enough.

Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.

The threat
of world's end is the old threat.

The world is not with us enough. O taste and see.

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?

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.

I learn to affirm
Truth's light at strange turns of the mind's road,
wrong turns that lead
over the border into wonder ...

I watch the clouds as I see them
in pomp advancing, pursuing
the fallen sun.

Nd as you read
the sea is turning its dark pages,
turning
its dark pages.

And our dreams,
with what frivolity we have pared them
like toenails, clipped them like ends of
split hair.

We call it "Nature"; only reluctantly admitting ourselves to be "Nature" too.

Two girls discover the secret of life
in a sudden line of poetry.

You have come to the shore. There are no instructions.

In June the bush we call
alder was heavy, listless,
its leaves studded with galls,
growing wherever we didn't
want it.

Marvelous Truth, confront us at every turn, in every guise.

Praise
the invisible sun burning beyond
the white cold sky, giving us
light and the chimney's shadow.

It is fatal to one's artistic life to talk about something this is in process.

Grey is the price
of neighboring with eagles, of knowing
a mountain's vast presence, seen or unseen.

If woman is inconstant, good, I am faithful to ebb and flow, I fall in season and now is a time of ripening.

Nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.

Breathe the sweetness that hovers in August ...

We have the words in our pockets,
obscure directions. The old ones
have taken away the light of their presence ...

Both art and faith are dependent on imagination; both are ventures into the unknown.

Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.

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.

Beespittle, droppings, hairs
of beefur: all become honey.
Virulent micro-organisms cannot
survive in honey.

Images
split the truth
in fractions.

My pleasure
was in the strength of my back,
in my noble shoulders, the cool
smooth flesh cylinders of my arms.

The artist must create himself or be born again.

But for us the road unfurls itself, we don't stop walking, we know there is far to go.

Slowly the pale
dew-beads of light
lapped up from flowers
can thicken,
darken to gold:
honey of the human.

At Delphi I prayed
to Apollo
that he maintain in me
the flame of the poem
and I drank of the brackish
spring there ...

In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.

What I heard was my whole self saying and singing what it knew: I can.