Philip Levine

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

— Philip Levine

I'm afraid we live at the mercy of a power, maybe a God, without mercy. And yet we find it, as I…

— Philip Levine

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

— Philip Levine

How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

— Philip Levine

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

— Philip Levine

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

— Philip Levine

“He embodied what he worshipped, the exquisite in the commonplace…salt for the spirit.”

— Philip Levine

“As you know, Joyce was a writer who asked his reader to give him a lifetime,” he said. “I am that reader,…

— Philip Levine

“Thirty years will pass before I remember that moment when suddenly I knew each man has one brother who dies when he…

— Philip Levine

“From they sack and they belly opened And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth They feed they Lion and…

— Philip Levine

Corruption is subtle, just like the Bible said. Many young poets have come to me and asked, How am I gonna make…

— Philip Levine

“ Our Valley We don't see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August when the worst heat seems to rise…

— Philip Levine

“The earth drinks all that’s left of you and asks for more.”

— Philip Levine

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

— Philip Levine

Listen to these young poets and you'll discover the voice of the present and hear the voice of the future before the…

— Philip Levine

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

— Philip Levine

“To be alone then, hearing only breeze, your own breath rising to answer with words you didn’t know you knew the pale…

— Philip Levine

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

— Philip Levine

I write what's given me to write.

— Philip Levine

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

— Philip Levine

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

— Philip Levine

I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their…

— Philip Levine

“If you stand / there long enough the air will thicken / with dusk and dust and exhaust / and finally with…

— Philip Levine

Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it's the home…

— Philip Levine

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

— Philip Levine