Quotes from Larry Levis

The moment of writing is not an escape...it is only an insistence, through the imagination, upon human ecstasy, and a reminder that such ecstasy remains as much a birthright in this world as misery remains a condition of it.

This story has no point but stillness itself...

Then think of fire, It's laughter, the music of splintering beams and glass, The flames reaching through the second story of a house almost as if to -mistakenly- rescue someone who left you years ago. It is so American, fire. So like us. It's desolation. And it's eventual, brief triumph.

Style, after all, is a kind of humor, Something truly beneath contempt...

After all, beauty has only three possible endings, & only one of them is bearable.

If you look at anything long enough, it turns into style.

I imagine the soul / Is something lighter than a girl's ribbon / I witnessed, one afternoon, as it fell–blue, from "The Letter

The naked human body is the grave in blossom: it is both Sad & instructive.