Top 83 Quotes & Sayings by Denise Levertov - Page 2

Do you mistake me? I am speaking of living, of moving from one moment into the next, and into the one after, breathing death in the spring air.

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.

I don't think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals.

So absolute, it is no other than happiness itself, a breathing too quiet to hear.

Rain-diamonds, this winter morning, embellish the tangle of unpruned pear-tree twigs; each solitaire, placed, it appears, with considered judgement, bears the light beneath the rifted clouds - the invisible shared out in endless abundance.

And our dreams, with what frivolity we have pared them like toenails, clipped them like ends of split hair.

Don't eat those nice green dollars your wife gives you for breakfast.

Let the space under the first storey be dark, let the water lap the stone posts, and vivid green slime glimmer upon them; let a boat be kept there.

Among a hundred windows shining dully in the vast side of greater-than-palace number such-and-such one burns these several years, each night as if the room within were aflame.

Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies.

our nerve filaments twitch with its presence day and night, nothing we say has not the husky phlegm of it in the saying, nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.

Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry.

The last cobwebs of fog in the black firtrees are flakes of white ash in the world's hearth.

Mountain, mountain, mountain, marking time. Each nameless, wall beyond wall, wavering redefinition of horizon.

I'll dig in into my days, having come here to live, not to visit. Grey is the price of neighboring with eagles, of knowing a mountain's vast presence, seen or unseen.

Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak of our own doubts, while dubiously we mother man in his doubt!

In June the bush we call alder was heavy, listless, its leaves studded with galls, growing wherever we didn't want it.

blue bead on the wick, there's that in me that burns and chills, blackening my heart with its soot, I think sometimes not Apollo heard me but a different god.

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.

The threat of world's end is the old threat.

Death and pain dominate this world, for though many are cured, they leave still weak, still tremulous, still knowing mortality has whispered to them; have seen in the folding of white bedspreads according to rule the starched pleats of a shroud.

In city, in suburb, in forest, no way to stretch out the arms - so if you would grow, go straight up or deep down.

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.