Denise Levertov Quotes

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

You have come to the shore. There are no instructions.

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

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

It's when we face for a moment the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know the taint in our own selves, that awe cracks the mind's shell and enters the heart.

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

What I heard was my whole self saying and singing what it knew: I can.

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

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.

Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering.

A poet articulating the dreads and horrors of our time is necessary in order to make readers understand what is happening, really understand it, not just know about it but feel it: and should be accompanied by a willingness on the part of those who write it to take additional action towards stopping the great miseries which they record.

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

I believe every space and comma is a living part of the poem and has its function, just as every muscle and pore of the body has its function. And the way the lines are broken is a functioning part essential to the life of the poem.

In the dark I rest, unready for the light which dawns day after day, eager to be shared. Black silk, shelter me. I need more of the night before I open eyes and heart to illumination. I must still grow in the dark like a root not ready, not ready at all.

In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.

Days pass when I forget the mystery. Problems insoluble and problems offering their own ignored solutions jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing their colored clothes; caps and bells. And then once more the quiet mystery is present to me, the throng's clamor recedes: the mystery that there is anything, anything at all, let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything, rather than void: and that, 0 Lord, Creator, Hallowed one, You still, hour by hour sustain it.

We must breathe time as fishes breathe water.

One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language.

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.

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.

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

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.

I learn to affirm Truth's light at strange turns of the mind's road, wrong turns that lead over the border into wonder.

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

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