Denise Levertov Quotes

52 quotes in 787 categories

• 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…
• The fire in leaf and grass so green it seems each summer the last summer.
• Affliction is more apt to suffocate the imagination than to stimulate it.
• 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…
• 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.…
• 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…
• Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering.
• Marvelous Truth, confront us at every turn, in every guise.
• Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies....
• When you're really caught up in writing a poem, it can be a form of prayer. I'm not very good at praying, but what I…
• 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…
• Nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.
• In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.
• Both art and faith are dependent on imagination; both are ventures into the unknown.
• I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer.
• 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…
• The artist must create himself or be born again.
• Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.
• Looking, Walking, Being, I look and look. Looking's a way of being: one becomes, sometimes, a pair of eyes walking. Walking wherever looking takes one.…
• In city, in suburb, in forest, no way to stretch out the arms - so if you would grow, go straight up or deep down.

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