Lisel Mueller Quotes

#1. Someone was always leaving
and never coming back.
The wooden houses wait like old wives
along this road; they are everywhere,
abandoned, leaning, turning gray.

Lisel Mueller

#2. Well, language seems to be something that obsesses me. I'm always writing about it.

Lisel Mueller

#3. At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.

Lisel Mueller

#4. Poetry, for me, is the answer to, 'How does one stay sane when private lives are being ransacked by public events?' It's something that hangs over your head all the time.

Lisel Mueller

#5. When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.

Lisel Mueller

#6. Whatever was bound to happen
in my story did not happen.
But I know there are rules that cannot be broken.
Perhaps a name was changed.
A small mistake. Perhaps
a woman I do not know
is facing the day with the heavy heart
that, by all rights, should have been mine.

Lisel Mueller

#7. My husband says spring will be early.
He says this every year,
And every year I disagree.
He needs me, the dark side of the planetary equation.
Together we make the equinox.

Lisel Mueller

#8. By the time I arrive at evening, / they have just settled down to rest; / already invisible, they are turning / into the dreamwork of the trees ... .

Lisel Mueller

#9. I am imprinted with the whole sense of European history, especially German history, going back to World War I, which really destroyed all the old values and culture. My grandparents had been reasonably well-off but they became quite poor, living in an attic apartment.

Lisel Mueller

#10. Now in the thriving season of love
when the bud relents into flower,
your love turned absence has turned once more,
and if my comforts fall soft as rain
on her flutters, it is because
love grows by what it remembers of love

Lisel Mueller

#11. You shall not twist my bones into a star's shape, nor plant my hair as roots for the dreams of the living; and if you open my heart and run your poet's fingers over its walls and cushions you will find it is like yours, dark.

Lisel Mueller

#12. How I would paint happiness
Something hidden, a windfall,
A meteor shower. No-
A flowering tree releasing
all its blossoms at once,
and the one standing beneath it
unexpectedly robed in bloom ...

Lisel Mueller

#13. I search the language for a word
to tell you how red is red.

Lisel Mueller

#14. This poem is endless, the odds against us are endless,
our chances of being alive together
statistically nonexistent;

Lisel Mueller

#15. How swiftly the strained honey
of afternoon light
flows into darkness
and the closed bud shrugs off
its special mystery
in order to break into blossom:
as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious

Lisel Mueller

#16. Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.

Lisel Mueller

#17. I will not return to a universe
of objects that do not know each other, as if islands were not the long lost children of one great continent

Lisel Mueller

#18. Everything is autobiography, even if one writes something that is totally objective. The fact that it's a subject that seizes you makes it autobiographical.

Lisel Mueller

#19. When I was in college, I did do some writing of poetry, somewhat inspired, I think at that time, by Carl Sandburg, because English was still relatively new to me, and Sandburg, of course, wrote in a very easy-to-understand, very colloquial and informal manner.

Lisel Mueller

#20. I thought if only we could go on
and meet again, shy as strangers.

Lisel Mueller