75 Quotes by Philip Levine

  • Author Philip Levine
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    I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.

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  • Author Philip Levine
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    Let's say I live to be eighty - I'm seventy-one now - nothing I do between now and eighty is going to change the way people think about my poetry.

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  • Author Philip Levine
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    My father's life seemed and still seems utterly mysterious to me. He came alone to the States from Russia at age eleven.

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  • Author Philip Levine
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    I think in the best poems I make a lot of discoveries about voice, about subject, about what my real feelings are.

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  • Author Philip Levine
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    My mother worked full-time so I was largely ungoverned, free to roam the streets of Detroit from an early age and research the poems to come, a tiny Walt Whitman going among powerful, uneducated people.

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  • Author Philip Levine
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    Well, don't kid yourself, I got plenty of crummy poems that I think I might use.

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  • Author Philip Levine
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    I've never known where I'm going until I've gone and come back, and then it takes me ages to see what the trip was about.

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  • Author Philip Levine
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    It would be nice to stumble onto one of those great projects so I could stay busy right through my dotage, but I'm not counting on it.

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