113 Quotes by Denise Levertov

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

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.

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

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 -

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.

There comes a time when only anger is love.

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.

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.

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