Top 40 Denise Levertov Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Denise Levertov

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

— Denise Levertov

3. “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.”

— Denise Levertov

4. “You have come to the shore. There are no instructions.”

— Denise Levertov

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

— Denise Levertov

6. “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.”

— Denise Levertov

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

— Denise Levertov

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

— Denise Levertov

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

— Denise Levertov

10. “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.”

— Denise Levertov

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

— Denise Levertov

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

— Denise Levertov

13. “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.”

— Denise Levertov

14. “The world is not with us enough. O taste and see.”

— Denise Levertov

15. “When you’re really caught up in writing a poem, it can be a form of prayer. I’m not very good at praying, but what I experience when I’m writing a poem is close to prayer. I feel it in different degrees and not with every poem. But in certain ways writing is a form of prayer.”

— Denise Levertov

16. “Marvelous Truth, confront us at every turn, in every guise.”

— Denise Levertov

17. “Rain-diamonds, this winter morning, embellish the tangle of unpruned pear-tree twigs; each solitaire, placed, it appears, with considered judgement, bears the light beneath the rifted clouds – the invisible shared out in endless abundance.”

— Denise Levertov

18. “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.”

— Denise Levertov

19. “Death and pain dominate this world, for though many are cured, they leave still weak, still tremulous, still knowing mortality has whispered to them; have seen in the folding of white bedspreads according to rule the starched pleats of a shroud.”

— Denise Levertov

20. “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.”

— Denise Levertov

21. “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.”

— Denise Levertov

22. “There comes a time when only anger is love.”

— Denise Levertov

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

— Denise Levertov

24. “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.”

— Denise Levertov

25. “The fire in leaf and grass so green it seems each summer the last summer.”

— Denise Levertov

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

— Denise Levertov

27. “We must breathe time as fishes breathe water.”

— Denise Levertov

28. “We call it “Nature”; only reluctantly admitting ourselves to be “Nature” too.”

— Denise Levertov

29. “I like to find what’s not found at once, but lies within something of another nature, in repose, distinct.”

— Denise Levertov

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

— Denise Levertov

31. “In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.”

— Denise Levertov

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

— Denise Levertov

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

— Denise Levertov

34. “Teachers at all levels encourage the idea that you have to talk about things in order to understand them, because they wouldn’t have jobs, otherwise. But it’s phony, you know.”

— Denise Levertov

35. “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 -.”

— Denise Levertov

36. “The artist must create himself or be born again.”

— Denise Levertov

37. “In city, in suburb, in forest, no way to stretch out the arms – so if you would grow, go straight up or deep down.”

— Denise Levertov

38. “I moonbathed diligently, as others sunbathe.”

— Denise Levertov

39. “The world is not with us enough.”

— Denise Levertov

40. “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.”

— Denise Levertov

41. “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.”

— Denise Levertov

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

— Denise Levertov

43. “It is fatal to one’s artistic life to talk about something this is in process.”

— Denise Levertov

44. “The poet does not use poetry, but is at the service of poetry. To use it is to misuse it.”

— Denise Levertov