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"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."
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"How frustrating to think you can be lost to yourself. And yet how often it is that a stranger stares back at you from the mirror. Maybe in truth we never see ourselves as clearly as the thousands of eyes that daily take us in."
"Setting fire to the roofs, getting away with the loot, suiting herself. She studied modern philosophy, read Sartre on the side, smoked Gitanes, and cultivated a look of bored contempt. But inwardly, she was seething with unfocused excitement, and looking for someone to worship."
"She liked getting hold of some book... and keeping it to herself, and gnawing its contents in privacy, and pondering the meaning without sharing her thoughts with any one, or having to decide whether the book was a good one or a bad one."
"Due to the monstrous activity of a handful of extremists, the majority of the human society has been conditioned to believe that the term 'musalman' is somehow synonymous with terrorism. But the reality is, the term 'musalman' refers to someone with 'musallam iman,' that means, a pure conscience. Thus any individual whose conscience is pure and clear, is a musalman or muslim, regardless of socio-religious background. Likewise, any human being who loves his or her neighbor is a Christian. Hence, scriptures can't define your religion, only your actions with other people do."
"Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome ...and well-dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a 'tone poet' and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. Such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal."
"If you spend your time trying to become who everyone else wants you to be, you will be torn apart. There is no way to be perfect in a world with so many different opinions on the right way to be. If you want to feel whole, you have to live as who you believe you need to be."
"We are all worms but I do believe that I am a glow-worm."
Explore more quotes by Philip Levine
"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."
"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."
"No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you."
"I realized poetry's the thing that I can do 'cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity."
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