Quotes from Denise Levertov

A blind man. I can stare at him ashamed, shameless. Or does he know it? No, he is in a great solitude. O, strange joy, to gaze my fill at a stranger's face. No, my thirst is greater than before.

Nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.

But for us the road unfurls itself, we don't stop walking, we know there is far to go.

Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.

The poem has a social effect of some kind whether or not the poet wills it to have. It has a kenetic force, it sets in motion...elements in the reader that would otherwise remain stagnant.

Writing poetry is a process of discovery...you can smell the poem before you see it....Like some animal.

blue bead on the wick, there's that in me that burns and chills, blackening my heart with its soot, I think sometimes not Apollo heard me but a different god.

Both art and faith are dependent on imagination; both are ventures into the unknown.

Mediocrity is perhaps due not so much to lack of imagination as to lack of faith in the imagination, lack of the capacity for this abandon.

Affliction is more apt to suffocate the imagination than to stimulate it.

I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer.

In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.

You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night.

Two by two in the ark ofthe ache of it.

Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies....

I like to findwhat's not foundat once, but lieswithin something of another naturein repose, distinct.

Marvelous Truth, confront us at every turn, in every guise.

Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.

Sometimes the mountain is hidden from me in veils of cloud, sometimes I am hidden from the mountain in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue, when I forget or refuse to go down to the shore or a few yards up the road, on a clear day, to reconfirm that witnessing presence.

When he opens his eyes he gives to what he gazes at the recognition no look ever before granted it. It becomes a word.

Grey is the price of neighboring with eagles, of knowing a mountain's vast presence, seen or unseen.

Your secret was not the craftsman's delight in process, which doesn't distinguish work from pleasure-- your way was not to exalt nor avoid the Adamic legacy, you simply made it irrelevant: everything faded, thinned to nothing, beside the light which bathed and warmed, the Presence your being had opened to. Where it shone, there life was, and abundantly; it touched your dullest task, and the task was easy.

Night is breathing close to us, dark, soft.

Can you endure life with two brides, bridegroom?