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"For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion."
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"Action is no less necessary than thought to the instinctive tendencies of the human frame."

"All of my misfortunes come from having thought too well of my fellows."

"Before making a snap judgment, ask yourself if it really is something that has hurt you or simply just made you angry at yourself for allowing it to happen. It's amazing what 'sleeping on it' can do. A new day sees a new beginning."

"I'm also involved in the rights of the disabled and do some fundraising for that and I thought it would have been a big boost for the campaign but it couldn't be worked out."

"There's nothing I've done which I'm ashamed of or I thought was actually bad."
Explore more quotes by Philip Levine

"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."

"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."

"I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves."

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

"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."
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