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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

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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
Block
Blocks
Police
Avenues
Silence
Fills
Way
Buddha
Overrules
Life
Temples
Oncoming
Vietnam
Overtakes
Tragic
Roar
Vast
Alleys

More quotes by Denise Levertov

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I like to find what's not found at once, but lies within something of another nature, in repose, distinct.
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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.
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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.
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Breathe the sweetness that hovers in August.
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Every day, every day I hear enough to fill a year of nights with wondering.
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In certain ways writing is a form of prayer.
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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?
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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.
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Love is a landscape the long mountains define but don't shut off from the unseeable distance.
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slowly the pale dew-beads of light lapped up from flowers can thicken, darken to gold: honey of the human.
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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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The artist must create himself or be born again.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Both art and faith are dependent on imagination both are ventures into the unknown.
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Images split the truth in fractions.
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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.
Denise Levertov
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The world is not with us enough. O taste and see.
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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.
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