Denise Levertov Quotes - Page 3

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

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")

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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 -

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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