Denise Levertov Quotes - Page 2

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

The artist must create himself or be born again.

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.

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

Images split the truth in fractions.

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

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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.

Breathe the sweetness that hovers in August.

There comes a time when only anger is love.

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.

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

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

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