Quotes by Philip Levine

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I have never been a violent man. Just a little creepy, it seems.

Philip Levine

It’s how I fill the time when nothing’s happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy.

Philip Levine

How weightless words are when nothing will do.

Philip Levine

And though I've lived to be an old man with my very own share of happiness for all the mess I made, I still judge every joyous moment, every victory and revelation against those few seconds of living.

Philip Levine

Let me begin again as a speck of dust caught in the night winds sweeping out to sea. Let me begin this time knowing the world is salt water and dark clouds, the world is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn comes slowly, and changes nothing.

Philip Levine

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

Philip Levine

My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.

Philip Levine

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 there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem.

Philip Levine

My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.

Philip Levine

Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.

Philip Levine

But I'm too old to be written about as a young poet.

Philip Levine

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 they have to invent themselves.

Philip Levine

No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.

Philip Levine

For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

Philip Levine

I write what's given me to write.

Philip Levine

I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.

Philip Levine

… the river sliding along its banks, darker now than the sky descending a last time to scatter its diamonds into these black waters that contain the day that passed, the night to come. — Excerpt from the poem “The Mercy

Philip Levine

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 co...

Philip Levine

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

Philip Levine

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.

Philip Levine