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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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"The job description, like most, used complicated words that made job-hopefuls hesitant to apply because it may be out of their range of capability."
"We are so used to working that not working is the new hard work."
"And yet, troublingly, there is one difference between 'labour' and other elements [raw materials, machinery] which conventional economics does not have a means to represent, or give weight to, but which is nevertheless unavoidably present in the world: the fact that labour feels pain."
"A salary is a tax employers pay, every four weeks, for putting an employee's dream on hold."
"Read the Bible. Work hard and honestly. And don't complain."
"Work is a vehicle with which man chases some fleeting destination called a full tummy."
"To some women, a job plays the role of a man. To most women, a man plays the role of a job."
"A specialist's mind is a slave to his specialization."
"Employee Engagement"Employee Engagement has become a very hot topic in recent years. The escalating statistics for disengagement are alarming. In 2015, the Gallup Polls' "The State of the American Workforce survey found that only 32.5 percent of the U.S. Workforce is engaged and committed where they work, and 54 percent say they would consider leaving their companies if they could receive a 20 percent raise elsewhere. Disengagement not only lowers performance, morale, and productivity, but it's costing employers billions of dollars a year. It's a growing problem, which has many companies baffled."
"12% of employees eat because they are hungry. 88% of employees eat because it is 1 o'clock."
Explore more quotes by Philip Levine
"I'm saying look, here they come, pay attention. Let your eyes transform what appears ordinary, commonplace, into what it is, a moment in time, an observed fragment of eternity."
"There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory."
"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."
"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."
"My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote."
"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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