Denise Levertov Quotes
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I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer.
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Each part of speech a spark awaiting redemption, each a virtue, a power in abeyance.
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At Delphi I prayed to Apollo that he maintain in me the flame of the poem and I drank of the brackish spring there.
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One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language.
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A poet articulating the dreads and horrors of our time is necessary in order to make readers understand what is happening, really understand it, not just know about it but feel it: and should be accompanied by a willingness on the part of those who write it to take additional action towards stopping the great miseries which they record.
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Affliction is more apt to suffocate the imagination than to stimulate it.
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The last cobwebs of fog in the black firtrees are flakes of white ash in the world's hearth.
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Breathe the sweetness that hovers in August.
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In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.
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Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry.
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Images split the truth in fractions.
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There comes a time when only anger is love.
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Peace as a positive condition of society, not merely as an interim between wars, is something so unknown that it casts no images on the mind's screen.
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You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night.
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We call it "Nature"; only reluctantly admitting ourselves to be "Nature" too.
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A blind man. I can stare at him ashamed, shameless. Or does he know it? No, he is in a great solitude. O, strange joy, to gaze my fill at a stranger's face. No, my thirst is greater than before.
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Nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.
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But we have only begun to love the earth. We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life. How could we tire of hope?-so much is in bud.
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I believe every space and comma is a living part of the poem and has its function, just as every muscle and pore of the body has its function. And the way the lines are broken is a functioning part essential to the life of the poem.
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The fire in leaf and grass so green it seems each summer the last summer.
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Yes, he is here in this open field, in sunlight, among the few young trees set out to modify the bare facts-- he's here, but only because we are here. When we go, he goes with us to be your hands that never do violence, your eyes that wonder, your lives that daily praise life by living it, by laughter. He is never alone here, never cold in the field of graves.
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In June the bush we call alder was heavy, listless, its leaves studded with galls, growing wherever we didn't want it.
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In the dark I rest, unready for the light which dawns day after day, eager to be shared. Black silk, shelter me. I need more of the night before I open eyes and heart to illumination. I must still grow in the dark like a root not ready, not ready at all.
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Mediocrity is perhaps due not so much to lack of imagination as to lack of faith in the imagination, lack of the capacity for this abandon.
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Love is a landscape the long mountains define but don't shut off from the unseeable distance.
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The stairway is not a thing of gleaming strands a radiant evanescence for angels' feet that only glance in their tread, and need not touch the stone.
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The vast silence of Buddha overtakes and overrules the oncoming roar of tragic life that fills alleys and avenues; it blocks the way of pedicabs, police, convoys.
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So absolute, it is no other than happiness itself, a breathing too quiet to hear.
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You have come to the shore. There are no instructions.
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Very few people really see things unless they've had someone in early life who made them look at things. And name them too. But the looking is primary, the focus.
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