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All Philip Levine Quotes
I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.
Philip Levine
61% of people like this quote
My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.
Philip Levine
60% of people like this quote
No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He's just too much himself and not you.
Philip Levine
58% of people like this quote
For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.
Philip Levine
58% of people like this quote
My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.
Philip Levine
57% of people like this quote
It's ironic that while I was a worker in Detroit, which I left when I was twenty six, my sense was that the thing that's going to stop me from being a poet is the fact that I'm doing this crummy work.
Philip Levine
57% of people like this quote
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
56% of people like this quote
There'll always be working people in my poems because I grew up with them, and I am a poet of memory.
Philip Levine
56% of people like this quote
The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.
Philip Levine
54% of people like this quote
Back then, I couldn't have left a poem a year and gone back to it.
Philip Levine
54% of people like this quote
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.
Philip Levine
52% of people like this quote
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.
Philip Levine
51% of people like this quote
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.
Philip Levine
51% of people like this quote
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