75 Quotes by Philip Levine

  • Author Philip Levine
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    I say, Father, the years have brought me here, still your son, they have brought me to a life I cannot understand.

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  • Author Philip Levine
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    I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.

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  • Author Philip Levine
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    You have to follow where the poem leads. And it will surprise you. It will say things you didn't expect to say. And you look at the poem and you realize, 'That is truly what I felt.' That is truly what I saw.

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  • Author Philip Levine
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    Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme...they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.

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  • Author Philip Levine
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    Corruption is subtle, just like the Bible said. Many young poets have come to me and asked, How am I gonna make it? They feel, and often with considerable justice, that they are being overlooked while others with less talent are out there making careers for themselves. I always give the same advice. I say, Do it the hard way, and you’ll always feel good about yourself. You write because you have to, and you get this unbelievable satisfaction from doing it well. Try to live on that as long as you’re able.

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  • Author Philip Levine
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    Now I must wait and be still and say nothing I don’t know, nothing I haven’t lived over and over, and that’s everything.

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  • Author Philip Levine
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    Now I think poetry will save nothing from oblivion, but I keep writing about the ordinary because for me it’s the home of the extraordinary, the only home.

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