75 Quotes by Philip Levine

  • Author Philip Levine
  • Quote

    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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    I’m afraid we live at the mercy of a power, maybe a God, without mercy. And yet we find it, as I have, from others.

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  • Author Philip Levine
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    Oh, yes, let’s bless the imagination. It gives us the myths we live by. Let’s bless the visionary power of the human – the only animal that’s got it –, bless the exact image of your father dead and mine dead, bless the images that stalk the corners of our sight and will not let go.

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  • Author Philip Levine
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    I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don’t come back.

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  • Author Philip Levine
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    No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He’s just too much himself and not you.

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  • Author Philip Levine
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    Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You’ll have that readership. Keep going until you know you’re doing work that’s worthy. And then see what happens. That’s my advice.

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  • Author Philip Levine
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    It’s ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that’s going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I’m doing this crummy work.

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  • Author Philip Levine
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    If that voice that you created that is most alive in the poem isn’t carried throughout the whole poem, then I destroy where it’s not there, and I reconstruct it so that that voice is the dominant voice in the poem.

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