Philip Levine Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

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

Philip Levine
I say, Father, the years have brought me here, still your son, they have brought me to a life I cannot understand.

Philip Levine
Give me back my young brother, hard and furious, with wide shoulders and a curse for God and burning eyes that look upon all creation and say, You can have it.

Philip Levine
And again the dead have found
a way into the hearts we swore were stone.

Philip Levine
I'm seventy-one now, so it's hard to imagine a dramatic change.

Philip Levine
For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.

Philip Levine
Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme...they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves.

Philip Levine
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.

Philip Levine
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.

Philip Levine
My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.

Philip Levine
I believed even then that if I could transform my experience into poetry I would give it the value and dignity it did not begin to possess on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life—or at least the part my work played in it—I could embrace it with some degree of joy, an element conspicuously missing from my life.

Philip Levine
No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.

Philip Levine
What can we do? Hang on and encourage each other, dig in, protest in every peaceful way possible.

Philip Levine
Q: Rain was always a favorite theme?
Levine: Rain was my first, and I guess, a constant theme. But things like wind in the winter, the trees, and my sense of relationship with them. You could actually see the stars, we were on the outskirts of Detroit, there were no factories around. So you could see the stars and, oh the world is, you know, a cosmos, is immense.

Philip Levine