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There's in my mind a... turbulent moon-ridden girl or old woman, or both, dressed in opals and rags, feathers and torn taffeta, who knows strange songs but she is not kind.

Denise Levertov

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Denise Levertov
Age: 74 †
Born: 1923
Born: October 24
Died: 1997
Died: December 20
Poet
Translator
Writer
Ilford
London
Priscilla D Levertoff
Priscilla Denise Levertoff
Priscilla Denise Levertov
Strange
Turbulent
Woman
Ridden
Girl
Rags
Song
Feathers
Kind
Dressed
Mind
Torn
Moon
Songs
Opal

More quotes by Denise Levertov

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Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering.
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our nerve filaments twitch with its presence day and night, nothing we say has not the husky phlegm of it in the saying, nothing we do has the quickness, the sureness, the deep intelligence living at peace would have.
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Each part of speech a spark awaiting redemption, each a virtue, a power in abeyance.
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Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.
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Beespittle, droppings, hairs of beefur: all become honey. Virulent micro-organisms cannot survive in honey.
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In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.
Denise Levertov
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The fire in leaf and grass so green it seems each summer the last summer.
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Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry.
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Praise the invisible sun burning beyond the white cold sky, giving us light and the chimney's shadow.
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At Delphi I prayed to Apollo that he maintain in me the flame of the poem and I drank of the brackish spring there.
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Hypocrite women, how seldom we speak of our own doubts, while dubiously we mother man in his doubt!
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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.
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Love is a landscape the long mountains define but don't shut off from the unseeable distance.
Denise Levertov
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The AvowalAs swimmers dareto lie face to the skyand water bears them,as hawks rest upon airand air sustains themso would I learn to attain freefall, and floatinto Creator Spirit's deep embrace,knowing no effort earnsthat all-surrounding grace.
Denise Levertov
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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
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There is no savor more sweet, more salt than to be glad to be what, woman, and who, myself, I am.
Denise Levertov
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In June the bush we call alder was heavy, listless, its leaves studded with galls, growing wherever we didn't want it.
Denise Levertov
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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
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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.
Denise Levertov
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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