top of page
.png){kind=small}
"For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Thought quotes
"I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in."
"A man's face as a rule says more, and more interesting things, than his mouth, for it is a compendium of everything his mouth will ever say, in that it is the monogram of all this man's thoughts and aspirations."
"It was such a lovely day I thought it a pity to get up."
"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."
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."
"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."
"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."
bottom of page