Denise Levertov Quotations

we are so many and many within themselves travel to far islands but no one asks for their story....

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.

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?

And our dreams, with what frivolity we have pared them like toenails, clipped them like ends of split hair.

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.

Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak of our own doubts, while dubiously we mother man in his doubt!

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?

Don't eat those nice green dollars your wife gives you for breakfast.

A blind man. I can stare at him ashamed, shameless. Or does he know it? No, he is in a great solitude. O, strange joy, to gaze my fill at a stranger's face. No, my thirst is greater than before.

Do you mistake me? I am speaking of living, of moving from one moment into the next, and into the one after, breathing death in the spring air....