All Philip Levine Quotes
- There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory. Good Memories
- 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. Inspirational
- I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back. Come Back
- You have begun to separate the dark from the dark. Begun
- How weightless/ words are when nothing will do. Funny
- I say, Father, the years have brought me here, still your son, they have brought me to a life I cannot understand. Brought
- My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely… Conscious
- My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist. Geared
- The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry. Became
- I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong. Armstrong
- I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home. Home
- My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family. Died
- 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… American
- For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion. From
- My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs. Ambition
- I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet. Encouraged
- Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it. Gone
- But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet. Old
- But most commonly, it's one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity. Commonly
- I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity. Cause
- I write what's given me to write. Given
- 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. Afraid
- I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an… Appears
- I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change. Change
- If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn't carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it's not… Alive