Top 35 Jack Gilbert Quotes
#1. Let me fall in love one last time, I beg them. Teach me mortality, frighten me into the present.
Jack Gilbert
#2. Why do so manysettle for so little? I don't understand why they're not greedy for what's inside them.
Jack Gilbert
#3. Question the bravery.
Say it's not courage. Call it a passion.
Jack Gilbert
#4. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.
Jack Gilbert
#5. The Japanese think it strange we paint our old wooden houses when it takes so long to find the wabi in them. They prefer the bonsai tree after the valiant blossoming is over, the leaves fallen. When bareness reveals a merit born in the vegetable struggling.
Jack Gilbert
#6. You can't work in a steel mill and think small. Giant converters hundreds of feet high. Every night, the sky looked enormous. It was a torrent of flames - of fire. The place that Pittsburgh used to be had such scale.
Jack Gilbert
#7. Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods. Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt. But there's music in us. Hope is pushed down but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
Jack Gilbert
#8. Fame is a lot of fun, but it's not interesting. I loved being noticed and praised, even the banquets. But they didn't have anything that I wanted. After about six months, I found it boring.
Jack Gilbert
#9. The Abandoned Valley
Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?
Jack Gilbert
#10. Walking in the dark streets of Seoul under the almost full moon. Lost for the last two hours. Finishing a loaf of bread and worried about the curfew. I have not spoken for three days and I am thinking, Why not just settle for love? Why not just settle for love instead?
Jack Gilbert
#11. I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.
Jack Gilbert
#12. I had lived all of my youthful dreams, but I couldn't think of many adult ones. I finally realized that we don't have many dreams for adults because, historically, people have always died much younger than they do today.
Jack Gilbert
#13. The women at Dachau knew they were about to be gassed when they pushed back the Nazi guard who wanted to die with them, saying he must live. And sang for a little while after the doors closed.
Jack Gilbert
#14. But one can acquire a taste for love as for loneliness or ugliness as for saintliness. Each a special way of going down.
Jack Gilbert
#15. Waking At Night
The blue river is grey at morning
and evening. There is twilight
at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark
wondering if this quiet in me now
is a beginning or an end.
Jack Gilbert
#16. I'm vain enough to think that I've made a successful life. I've had everything I've ever wanted. You can't beat that.
Jack Gilbert
#17. It's not the dreams.
It's this love of you
that grows in me
malignant.
Jack Gilbert
#18. Goodness is a triumph. And so it is / with love. Love is not the part / we are born with that flowers / a little and then wanes as we /
grow up. We cobble love together / from this and those of our machinery / until there is suddenly an apparition / that never existed before.
Jack Gilbert
#19. We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
Jack Gilbert
#21. We are a singularity that makes music out of noise because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.
Jack Gilbert
#22. It is foolish for Rubens to show her simpering. They were clearly guilty and did her much sorrow.
Jack Gilbert
#23. Without bravery, we will never be able to realize the vaulting scope of our own capacities. Without bravery, we will never know the world as richly as it longs to be known. Without bravery, our lives will remain small - far smaller than we probably want our lives to be.
Jack Gilbert
#24. Once she said the world was an astonishing animal: light was its spirit and noise was its mind. That it was composed to feed on honor, but did not.
Jack Gilbert
#25. The heart is a foreign country whose language none of us is good at.
Jack Gilbert
#26. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
Jack Gilbert
#27. We are resident inside with the machinery, a glimmering spread throughout the apparatus. We exist with a wind whispering inside and our moon flexing. Amid the ducts, inside the basilica of bones. The flesh is a neighborhood, but not the life.
Jack Gilbert
#28. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Jack Gilbert
#29. We exist with a wind whispering inside and our moon flexing. Amid the ducts, inside the basilica of bones.
Jack Gilbert
#31. When I was walking in the mountains with the Japanese man and began to hear the water, he said, 'What is the sound of the waterfall?' 'Silence,' he finally told me.
Jack Gilbert
#32. We think the fire eats the wood. We are wrong. The wood reaches out to the flame. The fire licks at what the wood harbors, and the wood gives itself away to that intimacy, the manner in which we and the world meet each new day.
Jack Gilbert
#33. How could they think women a recreation? Or the repetition of bodies of steady interest? Only the ignorant or the busy could.
Jack Gilbert
#34. We are all burning in time, but each is consumed
at his own speed.
Jack Gilbert
#35. How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite.
Jack Gilbert
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