Top 83 Quotes & Sayings by Denise Levertov

slowly the pale dew-beads of light lapped up from flowers can thicken, darken to gold: honey of the human.

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.

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.

Affliction is more apt to suffocate the imagination than to stimulate it.

There is no savor more sweet, more salt than to be glad to be what, woman, and who, myself, I am.

Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.

Looking, Walking, Being, I look and look. Looking's a way of being: one becomes, sometimes, a pair of eyes walking. Walking wherever looking takes one. The eyes dig and burrow into the world. They touch, fanfare, howl, madrigal, clamor. World and the past of it, not only visible present, solid and shadow that looks at one looking. And language? Rhythms of echo and interruption? That's a way of breathing. breathing to sustain looking, walking and looking, through the world, in it.

Marvelous Truth, confront us at every turn, in every guise.

If woman is inconstant, good, I am faithful to ebb and flow, I fall in season and now is a time of ripening.

Love is a landscape the long mountains define but don't shut off from the unseeable distance.

The artist must create himself or be born again.

What I heard was my whole self saying and singing what it knew: I can.

The AvowalAs swimmers dareto lie face to the skyand water bears them,as hawks rest upon airand air sustains them;so would I learn to attain freefall, and floatinto Creator Spirit's deep embrace,knowing no effort earnsthat all-surrounding grace.

Praise the invisible sun burning beyond the white cold sky, giving us light and the chimney's shadow.

We are so many and many within themselves travel to far islands but no one asks for their story.

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.

There's in my mind a... turbulent moon-ridden girl or old woman, or both, dressed in opals and rags, feathers and torn taffeta, who knows strange songs but she is not kind.

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.

We have the words in our pockets, obscure directions. The old ones have taken away the light of their presence.

In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.

I learn to affirm Truth's light at strange turns of the mind's road, wrong turns that lead over the border into wonder.

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.

Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering.

Nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.

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.

You have come to the shore. There are no instructions.

Through the hollow globe, a ring of frayed rusty scrapiron, is it the sea that shines? Is it a road at the world's edge?

We must breathe time as fishes breathe water.

Days pass when I forget the mystery. Problems insoluble and problems offering their own ignored solutions jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing their colored clothes; caps and bells. And then once more the quiet mystery is present to me, the throng's clamor recedes: the mystery that there is anything, anything at all, let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything, rather than void: and that, 0 Lord, Creator, Hallowed one, You still, hour by hour sustain it.

I thought I was growing wings— it was a cocoon. I thought, now is the time to step into the fire— it was deep water. Eschatology is a word I learned as a child: the study of Last Things; facing my mirror—no longer young, the news—always of death, the dogs—rising from sleep and clamoring and howling, howling.... ("Seeing For a Moment")

The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion...elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant.

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.

Breathe the sweetness that hovers in August.

Writing poetry is a process of discovery...you can smell the poem before you see it....Like some animal.

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.

Wear scarlet! Tear the green lemons off the tree! I don't want to forget who I am, what has burned in me, and hang limp and clean, an empty dress -

Images split the truth in fractions.

When you're really caught up in writing a poem, it can be a form of prayer. I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer. I feel it in different degrees and not with every poem. But in certain ways writing is a form of prayer.

Prophetic utterance, like poetic utterance, transforms experience and moves the receiver to new attitudes. The kinds of experience--the recognitions or revelations--out of which both prophecy and poetry emerge, are such as to stir the prophet or poet to speech that may exceed their own known capacities; they are "inspired," they breathe in revelation and breathe out new words; and by so doing they transfer over to the listener or reader a parallel experience, a parallel intensity, which impels that person into new attitudes and new actions.

The world is not with us enough. O taste and see.

Teachers at all levels encourage the idea that you have to talk about things in order to understand them, because they wouldn't have jobs, otherwise. But it's phony, you know.

The fire in leaf and grass so green it seems each summer the last summer.

What joy when the insouciant armadillo glances at us and doesn't quicken his trotting across the track into the palm brush. What is this joy? That no animal falters, but knows what it must do?

I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer.

It's when we face for a moment the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know the taint in our own selves, that awe cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart.

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.

I like to find what's not found at once, but lies within something of another nature, in repose, distinct.

There comes a time when only anger is love.

Each part of speech a spark awaiting redemption, each a virtue, a power in abeyance.

Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.

Beespittle, droppings, hairs of beefur: all become honey. Virulent micro-organisms cannot survive in honey.

It is fatal to one's artistic life to talk about something that is in process.

At Delphi I prayed to Apollo that he maintain in me the flame of the poem and I drank of the brackish spring there.

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.

An absolute patience. Trees stand up to their knees in fog. The fog slowly flows uphill. White cobwebs, the grass leaning where deer have looked for apples. The woods from brook to where the top of the hill looks over the fog, send up not one bird. So absolute, it is no other than happiness itself, a breathing too quiet to hear.

Both art and faith are dependent on imagination; both are ventures into the unknown.

We call it "Nature"; only reluctantly admitting ourselves to be "Nature" too.

I watch the clouds as I see them in pomp advancing, pursuing the fallen sun.

But for us the road unfurls itself, we don't stop walking, we know there is far to go.

my pleasure was in the strength of my back, in my noble shoulders, the cool smooth flesh cylinders of my arms.