Philip Levine Quotes

29 quotes in 327 categories

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