Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Stills
Neighbor
Wakes
Still
Door
Needles
Live
Flower
Deck
Even
Doors
Dropping
Years
Tree
Honored
Venerable
Bigs
Shed
Sheds
Next
Onto
Cones
Night
Flowers
Pine

More quotes by Denise Levertov

Image
slowly the pale dew-beads of light lapped up from flowers can thicken, darken to gold: honey of the human.
Denise Levertov
Image
Images split the truth in fractions.
Denise Levertov
Image
Two girls discover the secret of life in a sudden line of poetry.
Denise Levertov
Image
And our dreams, with what frivolity we have pared them like toenails, clipped them like ends of split hair.
Denise Levertov
Image
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
Image
There is no savor more sweet, more salt than to be glad to be what, woman, and who, myself, I am.
Denise Levertov
Image
At Delphi I prayed to Apollo that he maintain in me the flame of the poem and I drank of the brackish spring there.
Denise Levertov
Image
Beespittle, droppings, hairs of beefur: all become honey. Virulent micro-organisms cannot survive in honey.
Denise Levertov
Image
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
Image
Praise the invisible sun burning beyond the white cold sky, giving us light and the chimney's shadow.
Denise Levertov
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
In June the bush we call alder was heavy, listless, its leaves studded with galls, growing wherever we didn't want it.
Denise Levertov
Image
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
Image
Grief is a hole you walk around in the daytime and at night you fall into it.
Denise Levertov
Image
In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.
Denise Levertov
Image
Each part of speech a spark awaiting redemption, each a virtue, a power in abeyance.
Denise Levertov
Image
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
Image
An absolute patience. Trees stand up to their knees in fog. The fog slowly flows uphill. White cobwebs, the grass leaning where deer have looked for apples. The woods from brook to where the top of the hill looks over the fog, send up not one bird. So absolute, it is no other than happiness itself, a breathing too quiet to hear.
Denise Levertov