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“Both art and faith are dependent on imagination; both are ventures into the unknown.”
-- Denise Levertov
#Art #Imagination #Venture
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“I'm not very good at praying, but what I experience when I'm writing a poem is close to prayer.”
-- Denise Levertov
#Prayer #Writing #Praying
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“You have come to the shore. There are no instructions.”
-- Denise Levertov
#Instruction #Shore
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“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
#Heart #Self #Mind
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“Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.”
-- Denise Levertov
#Grief #Fall #Night
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“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
#Flower #Night #Doors
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“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.”
-- Denise Levertov
#Writing #Order #Stopping
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“In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.”
-- Denise Levertov
#Prayer #Writing #Way
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“Nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.”
-- Denise Levertov
#Utopian #Quickness
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“Marvelous Truth, confront us at every turn, in every guise.”
-- Denise Levertov
#Turns
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“But for us the road unfurls itself, we don't stop walking, we know there is far to go.”
-- Denise Levertov
#Walking
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“What I heard was my whole self saying and singing what it knew: I can.”
-- Denise Levertov
#Self #Singing #Heard
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“Mountain, mountain, mountain, marking time. Each nameless, wall beyond wall, wavering redefinition of horizon.”
-- Denise Levertov
#Wall #Mountain #Horizon
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“Through the hollow globe, a ring of frayed rusty scrapiron, is it the sea that shines? Is it a road at the world's edge?”
-- Denise Levertov
#Sea #Shining #World
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“Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak of our own doubts, while dubiously we mother man in his doubt!”
-- Denise Levertov
#Mother #Hypocrite #Men
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“blue bead on the wick, there's that in me that burns and chills, blackening my heart with its soot, I think sometimes not Apollo heard me but a different god.”
-- Denise Levertov
#Heart #Thinking #Blue
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“we are so many and many within themselves travel to far islands but no one asks for their story....”
-- Denise Levertov
#Travel #Islands #Stories
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“my pleasure was in the strength of my back, in my noble shoulders, the cool smooth flesh cylinders of my arms.”
-- Denise Levertov
#Dream #Noble #Flesh
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“The stairway is not a thing of gleaming strands a radiant evanescence for angels' feet that only glance in their tread, and need not touch the stone.”
-- Denise Levertov
#Angel #Feet #Needs
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“The threat of world's end is the old threat.”
-- Denise Levertov
#World #Ends #Threat
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“Beespittle, droppings, hairs of beefur: all become honey. Virulent micro-organisms cannot survive in honey.”
-- Denise Levertov
#Hair #Honey #Dropping
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“slowly the pale dew-beads of light lapped up from flowers can thicken, darken to gold: honey of the human.”
-- Denise Levertov
#Flower #Light #Gold
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“The last cobwebs of fog in the black firtrees are flakes of white ash in the world's hearth.”
-- Denise Levertov
#Fog #White #Black
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“Let the space under the first storey be dark, let the water lap the stone posts, and vivid green slime glimmer upon them; let a boat be kept there.”
-- Denise Levertov
#Dark #Space #Water
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“What joy when the insouciant armadillo glances at us and doesn't quicken his trotting across the track into the palm brush. What is this joy? That no animal falters, but knows what it must do?”
-- Denise Levertov
#Animal #Track #Joy
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“The vast silence of Buddha overtakes and overrules the oncoming roar of tragic life that fills alleys and avenues; it blocks the way of pedicabs, police, convoys.”
-- Denise Levertov
#Block #Silence #Police
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“I watch the clouds as I see them in pomp advancing, pursuing the fallen sun.”
-- Denise Levertov
#Clouds #Watches #Sun
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“Among a hundred windows shining dully in the vast side of greater-than-palace number such-and-such one burns these several years, each night as if the room within were aflame.”
-- Denise Levertov
#Night #Years #Numbers
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“Each part of speech a spark awaiting redemption, each a virtue, a power in abeyance....”
-- Denise Levertov
#Redemption #Speech #Sparks
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“Love is a landscape the long mountains define but don't shut off from the unseeable distance.”
-- Denise Levertov
#Love #Distance #Long
