Top 35 Philip Levine Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Now I must wait and be still and say nothing I don’t know, nothing I haven’t lived over and over, and that’s everything.”

— Philip Levine

2. “You have begun to separate the dark from the dark.”

— Philip Levine

3. “You have to follow where the poem leads. And it will surprise you. It will say things you didn’t expect to say. And you look at the poem and you realize, ‘That is truly what I felt.’ That is truly what I saw.”

— Philip Levine

4. “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

5. “I write what’s given me to write.”

— Philip Levine

6. “Listen to these young poets and you’ll discover the voice of the present and hear the voice of the future before the future is even here.”

— Philip Levine

7. “I have a sense that many Americans, especially those like me with European or foreign parents, feel they have to invent their families just as they have to invent themselves.”

— Philip Levine

8. “My sense of a poem – my notion of how you revise – is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.”

— Philip Levine

9. “I find you in these tears, few, useless and here at last. Don’t come back.”

— Philip Levine

10. “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

11. “I listen to jazz about three hours a day. I love Louis Armstrong.”

— Philip Levine

12. “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

13. “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

14. “The earth drinks all that’s left of you and asks for more.”

— Philip Levine

15. “My father died when I was five, but I grew up in a strong family.”

— Philip Levine

16. “Oh, yes, let’s bless the imagination. It gives us the myths we live by. Let’s bless the visionary power of the human – the only animal that’s got it –, bless the exact image of your father dead and mine dead, bless the images that stalk the corners of our sight and will not let go.”

— Philip Levine

17. “The irony is, going to work every day became the subject of probably my best poetry.”

— Philip Levine

18. “If she were writing by candlelight she would now be in the dark, for a living flame would refuse to be fed by such pure exhaustion. Actually she is in the dark, for the.”

— Philip Levine

19. “I was very lucky to have a mother who encouraged me to become a poet.”

— Philip Levine

20. “Don’t scorn your life just because it’s not dramatic, or it’s impoverished, or it looks dull, or it’s workaday. Don’t scorn it. It is where poetry is taking place if you’ve got the sensitivity to see it, if your eyes are open.” – Philip Levine, describing what he learned from William Carlos Williams, via NPR.”

— Philip Levine

21. “I realized poetry’s the thing that I can do ’cause I can stick at it and work with tremendous intensity.”

— Philip Levine

22. “My mother carried on and supported us; her ambition had been to write poetry and songs.”

— Philip Levine

23. “But most commonly, it’s one poem that I work on with a lot of intensity.”

— Philip Levine

24. “Back then, I couldn’t have left a poem a year and gone back to it.”

— Philip Levine

25. “I still believe in this country, that it can fulfill the destiny Blake and Whitman envisioned. I still believe in American poetry.”

— Philip Levine

26. “To be alone then, hearing only breeze, your own breath rising to answer with words you didn’t know you knew the pale questions of the full moon, to know for the first time you are without a name or number.”

— Philip Levine

27. “I say, Father, the years have brought me here, still your son, they have brought me to a life I cannot understand.”

— Philip Levine

28. “For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.”

— Philip Levine

29. “I started listening to music when I wrote when I had three sons at home.”

— Philip Levine

30. “No one can write like Vallejo and not sound like a fraud. He’s just too much himself and not you.”

— Philip Levine

31. “Meet some people who care about poetry the way you do. You’ll have that readership. Keep going until you know you’re doing work that’s worthy. And then see what happens. That’s my advice.”

— Philip Levine

32. “I’m seventy-one now, so it’s hard to imagine a dramatic change.”

— Philip Levine

33. “My earliest poems were a way of talking to somebody. I suppose to myself.”

— Philip Levine

34. “But I’m too old to be written about as a young poet.”

— Philip Levine

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

— Philip Levine

36. “My temperament is not geared to that of a novelist.”

— Philip Levine

37. “I have tried to write poetry for people for whom there is no poetry.”

— Philip Levine