113 Quotes by Denise Levertov

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 -.

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.

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

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