Larry Levis > Quotes

“The moment of writing is not an escape...it is only an insistence, through the imagination, upon human ecstasy, and a reminder that such ecstasy remains as much a birthright in this world as misery remains a condition of it.”
― Larry Levis

“This story has no point but stillness itself...”
― Larry Levis

“Then think of fire, It’s laughter, the music of splintering beams and glass, The flames reaching through the second story of a house almost as if to -mistakenly- rescue someone who left you years ago. It is so American, fire. So like us. It’s desolation. And it’s eventual, brief triumph.”
― Larry Levis

“Style, after all, is a kind of humor,
Something truly beneath contempt...”
― Larry Levis

“After all, beauty has only three possible endings, & only one of them is bearable.”
― Larry Levis

“If you look at anything long enough, it turns into style.”
― Larry Levis, The Widening Spell of the Leaves

“The naked human body is the grave in blossom: it is both
Sad & instructive.”
― Larry Levis, The Widening Spell of the Leaves

“My love and I are inventing a country, which we can already see taking shape, as if wheels were passing through yellow mud. But there is a problem: if we put a river in the country, it will thaw and begin flooding. If we put the river on the border, there will be trouble. If we forget about the river, there will be now way out. There is already a sky over that country, waiting for clouds or smoke. Birds have flown into it, too. Each evening more trees fill with their eyes, and what they see we can never erase.”
― Larry Levis, The Afterlife

“I imagine the soul / Is something lighter than a girl’s ribbon / I witnessed, one afternoon, as it fell–blue,

from “The Letter”
― Larry Levis, Winter Stars

“Sometimes I almost believe her soul looks out
of the photograph, almost clears the sill
Of the eyes & comes near; though it does not ever
Move, it holds me while I look at it.
But even today, I can’t conceive of a soul
Without seeing a woman’s body. Specifically,
Yours, undoing the straps of an evening dress
In a convertible, & then lying back, your breasts
Holding that hint of dusk mixed with mint
And the emptiness of dusk. Someone put it
Crudely: to fuck is to know. If that is true,
There’s a corollary: the soul is a canary sent
Into the mines. The convertible is white, & parked
Beneath the black trees shading the river,
Mile after mile. Your dress is off by now,
And when you come, both above & below me,
When you vanish into that one cry which means
Your body is no longer quite your own
And when your face looks like a face stricken
From this world, a saint’s face, your eyes closing
On some final city made entirely
Of light, & only to be unmade by light
Again—at that moment I’m still watching
You—half out of reverence & half because
The scene is distant, like a landscape, & has
Nothing to do with me. Beneath the quiet
Of those trees, & that sky, I imagine
I’m simply a miner in a cave; I imagine the soul
Is something lighter than a girl’s ribbon
I witnessed, one afternoon, as it fell—blue,
Tossed, withered somehow, & singular, at
A friend’s wedding—& then into the river
And swirled away. Do I chip away with my hammer?
Do I, sometimes, sing or recite? Even though
I have to know, in such a darkness, all
The words by heart, I sing. And when I come,
My eyes are closed fast. I smile, under
The earth. They loved fast horses. And someone else
Will have to watch them, grazing on short tufts
Of spring grass beside the riverbank,
When we are gone, when we are light, & grass. .

— Larry Levis, from “A Letter,” Winter Stars (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985)”
― Larry Levis, Winter Stars

“After all, beauty has only three possible endings, & only one of
them is bearable.”
― Larry Levis

“I've loved you
as a man loves an old wound
picked up in a razor fight
on a street nobody remembers.
Look at him:
even in the dark he touches it gently.”
― Larry Levis

“no tense is as sad as the future's.”
― Larry Levis, The Selected Levis