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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
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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
Lack
Capacity
Perhaps
Imagination
Faith
Much
Mediocrity
Abandon
Dues
More quotes by Denise Levertov
Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies.
Denise Levertov
Mountain, mountain, mountain, marking time. Each nameless, wall beyond wall, wavering redefinition of horizon.
Denise Levertov
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.
Denise Levertov
And our dreams, with what frivolity we have pared them like toenails, clipped them like ends of split hair.
Denise Levertov
In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.
Denise Levertov
Peace as a positive condition of society, not merely as an interim between wars, is something so unknown that it casts no images on the mind's screen.
Denise Levertov
The threat of world's end is the old threat.
Denise Levertov
The fire in leaf and grass so green it seems each summer the last summer.
Denise Levertov
Each part of speech a spark awaiting redemption, each a virtue, a power in abeyance.
Denise Levertov
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
The artist must create himself or be born again.
Denise Levertov
Praise the invisible sun burning beyond the white cold sky, giving us light and the chimney's shadow.
Denise Levertov
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
Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.
Denise Levertov
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
But for us the road unfurls itself, we don't stop walking, we know there is far to go.
Denise Levertov
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
Love is a landscape the long mountains define but don't shut off from the unseeable distance.
Denise Levertov
One of the obligations of the writer is to say or sing all that he or she can, to deal with as much of the world as becomes possible to him or her in language.
Denise Levertov
The world is not with us enough. O taste and see.
Denise Levertov
