Philip Levine
Poet
1928-01-10
Quotes by Philip Levine
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Let me begin again as a speckof dust caught in the night windssweeping out to sea. Let me beginthis time knowing the world issalt water and dark clouds, the worldis grinding and sighing all night, and dawncomes slowly, and changes nothing.
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I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life— or at least the part my work played in it— I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.
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How weightlesswords are when nothing will do.
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How weightlesswords are when nothing will do.
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Let me begin again as a speckof dust caught in the night windssweeping out to sea. Let me beginthis time knowing the world issalt water and dark clouds, the worldis grinding and sighing all night, and dawncomes slowly, and changes nothing.
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I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life— or at least the part my work played in it— I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.
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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 observed fragment of eternity.
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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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