Philip Levine Quotes
29 quotes
in 327 categories
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There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
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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.
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I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.
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You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.
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How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.
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I say, Father, the years have brought me here, still your son, they have brought me to a life I cannot understand.
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My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely…
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My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.
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The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
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I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.
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I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.
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My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.
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I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as…
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For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.
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My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
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I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.
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Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.
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But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.
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But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.
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I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.
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