Philip Levine Quotes

He embodied what he worshipped, the exquisite in the commonplace…salt for the spirit.

There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.

I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don't come back.

With no morning the day is sold.

The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.

My mother carried on and supported us her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.

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.

How weightlesswords are when nothing will do.

I find you in these tears, few,

The earth drinks all that’s left of you and asks for more.

If she were writing by candlelight she would now be in the dark, for a living flame would refuse to be fed by such pure exhaustion.

I speak to H. in a bar         in downtown L.A. Over a schooner of beer         he waits out the day

From they sack and they belly opened

I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.

The new grass rising in the hills,the cows loitering in the morning chill,a dozen or more old browns hiddenin the shadows of the cottonwoodsbeside the streambed. I go higherto where the road gives up...

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...

Poetry is like truth: on one level it simply is, and as such it is available to anyone. Anyone, that is, who will spend himself or herself to receive it, for no one has an inherent right to truth. One...

We don't see the ocean, not ever, but in July and Augustwhen the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchardwhen suddenly the wind cools and...

The ship that took my mother to Ellis Islandeighty-three years ago was named The Mercy.She remembers trying to eat a bananawithout first peeling it and seeing her first orangein the hands of a young S...

To be alone then, hearing only breeze, your own breath rising to answer with words you didn’t know you knew the pale questions of the full moon, to know for the first time you are without a name or nu...