Able Quote by Philip Levine

“Corruption is subtle, just like the Bible said. Many young poets have come to me and asked, How am I gonna make it? They feel, and often with considerable justice, that they are being overlooked while others with less talent are out there making careers for themselves. I always give the same advice. I say, Do it the hard way, and you’ll always feel good about yourself. You write because you have to, and you get this unbelievable satisfaction from doing it well. Try to live on that as long as you’re able.”

Philip Levine

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

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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…

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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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How weightless/ words are when nothing will do.

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

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

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

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

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“ Our Valley We don't see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost believe…

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

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Explore all 48 Philip Levine quotes

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