top of page
.png){kind=small}
Exlpore more People quotes
"We should not judge people by their peak of excellence; but by the distance they have traveled from the point where they started."
"I believe that in every country the people themselves are more peaceably and liberally inclined than their governments."
"A lot of people are afraid of heights. Not me, I'm afraid of widths."
"People generally quarrel because they cannot argue."
"How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?"
"I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one."
"I am confident that, in the end, common sense and justice will prevail. I'm an optimist, brought up on the belief that if you wait to the end of the story, you get to see the good people live happily ever after."
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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
bottom of page