Philip Levine Quotes

How weightlesswords are when nothing will do.

~ Philip Levine

Let me begin again as a speckof dust caught in the night windssweeping out to sea. Let me beginthis time knowing the world issalt water and dark clouds, the worldis grinding and sighing all night, and dawncomes slowly, and changes nothing.

~ Philip Levine

… the river sliding along its banks, darker now than the sky descending a last time to scatter its diamonds into these black waters that contain the day that passed, the night to come. — Excerpt from the poem “The Mercy

~ 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

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

~ Philip Levine