Denise Levertov Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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

In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

There comes a time when only anger is love.

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.

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?

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

Images split the truth in fractions.

The artist must create himself or be born again.

Breathe the sweetness that hovers in August.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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