Philip Levine quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Philip Levine

Philip Levine Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Philip Levine on Wise Famous Quotes.

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.

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.

I say, Father, the years have brought me here, still your son, they have brought me to a life I cannot understand.

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.

For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

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.

I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.

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

I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.

Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary into what it is ... a moment in time; an observed fragment of eternity.

My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.

My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.

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.

You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.

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

...with no morning the day is sold.

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.

I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.

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.

But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

I write what's given me to write.

But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.

I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.

No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.