Quotes from Denise Levertov

And we, frightened, bored, wanting only to sleep till catastrophe has raged, clashed, seethed and gone by without us, wanting then to awaken in quietude without remembrance of agony, we who in shamefaced private hope had looked to be plucked from fire and given a bliss we deserved for having imagined it, is it implied that we must protect this perversely weak animal, whose muzzle's nudgings suppose there is milk to be found in us? Must hold to our icy hearts a shivering God?

and nothing was burning, nothing but I

I moonbathed diligently, as others sunbathe.

But we have only begun to love the earth. We have only begun to imagine the fullness of life. How could we tire of hope?-so much is in bud.

Very few people really see things unless they've had someone in early life who made them look at things. And name them too. But the looking is primary, the focus.

my pleasure was in the strength of my back, in my noble shoulders, the cool smooth flesh cylinders of my arms.

If woman is inconstant, good, I am faithful to ebb and flow, I fall in season and now is a time of ripening.

It is fatal to one's artistic life to talk about something that is in process.

The vast silence of Buddha overtakes and overrules the oncoming roar of tragic life that fills alleys and avenues; it blocks the way of pedicabs, police, convoys.

Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry.

Do you mistake me? I am speaking of living, of moving from one moment into the next, and into the one after, breathing death in the spring air.

We must breathe time as fishes breathe water.

Mountain, mountain, mountain, marking time. Each nameless, wall beyond wall, wavering redefinition of horizon.

Love is a landscape the long mountains define but don't shut off from the unseeable distance.

There comes a time when only anger is love.

We are so many and many within themselves travel to far islands but no one asks for their story.

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

Images split the truth in fractions.

Wear scarlet! Tear the green lemons off the tree! I don't want to forget who I am, what has burned in me, and hang limp and clean, an empty dress -

In June the bush we call alder was heavy, listless, its leaves studded with galls, growing wherever we didn't want it.

Peace as a positive condition of society, not merely as an interim between wars, is something so unknown that it casts no images on the mind's screen.

There is no savor more sweet, more salt than to be glad to be what, woman, and who, myself, I am.

I'll dig in into my days, having come here to live, not to visit. Grey is the price of neighboring with eagles, of knowing a mountain's vast presence, seen or unseen.

Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak of our own doubts, while dubiously we mother man in his doubt!