Top 73 Louise Gluck Quotes
#3. Silence had entered me.
It was like the night, and my memories - they were like stars
in that they were fixed, though of course
if one would see they are unending fires, like the fires of hell.
Louise Gluck
#4. At the end of my suffering/there was a door.
Louise Gluck
#5. Doesn't everyone want to feel in the night
the beloved body, compass, polestar,
to hear the quiet breathing that says
I am alive, that means also
you are alive, because you hear me,
you are here with me
Louise Gluck
#6. What was difficult
was the travel, which,
on arrival, is forgotten.
Louise Gluck
#7. 17. The self ended and the world began. They were of equal size, commensurate, one mirrored the other. 18. The riddle was: why couldn't we live in the mind. The answer was: the barrier of the earth intervened.
Louise Gluck
#8. We have a disturbing cultural appetite for novelty, and it seems to me wrong each new laureate should dislodge the ideas of his or her predecessor, especially when they're still unfolding.
Louise Gluck
#9. I'm like the child who buries
her head in the pillow
so as not to see, the child who tells herself
that light causes sadness -
Louise Gluck
#10. I don't need your praise
to survive. I was here first,
before you were here, before
you ever planted a garden.
And I'll be here when only the sun and moon
are left, and the sea, and the wide field.
I will constitute the field.
Louise Gluck
#11. He takes her in his arms
He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you
But he thinks
this is a lie, so he says in the end
You're dead, nothing can hurt you
which seems to him
a more promising beginning, more true.
Louise Gluck
#12. You're not a creature in body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.
Louise Gluck
#13. Tell me this is the future,
I won't believe you.
Tell me I'm living,
I won't believe you.
Louise Gluck
#14. I think here I will leave you. It has come to seem
there is no perfect ending.
Indeed, there are infinite endings.
Or perhaps, once one begins,
there are only endings.
Louise Gluck
#15. You know, he said, our work is difficult: we confront
much sorrow and disappointment.
He gazed at me with increasing frankness.
I was like you once, he added, in love with turbulence.
Louise Gluck
#17. Tell me, the poet says, the lie I need to feel safe, and tell me in your own voice, so I believe you. One more tale to stay alive.
Louise Gluck
#20. They sat far apart
deliberately, to experience, daily,
the sweetness of seeing each other across
great distance.
Louise Gluck
#21. The powerful are always lied to since the weak are always driven to panic
Louise Gluck
#23. It had occurred to me that all human beings are divided into those who wish to move forward and those who wish to go back. Or you could say, those who wish to keep moving and those who want to be stopped in their tracks as by the blazing sword.
Louise Gluck
#24. The soul is silent.
If it speaks at all
it speaks in dreams.
Louise Gluck
#25. Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you've no longer been bested by these events.
Louise Gluck
#26. I fell asleep in a river, I woke in a river,
of my mysterious
failure to die I can tell you
nothing, neither
who saved me nor for what cause -
Louise Gluck
#27. Once I could imagine my soul
I could imagine my death.
When I imagined my death
my soul died. This
I remember clearly.
My body persisted.
Not thrived, but persisted.
Why I do not know.
Louise Gluck
#28. The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those;
they govern me.
Louise Gluck
#29. Toward his critics, the artist harbors a defensive ace: knowledge that the future will erase the present.
Louise Gluck
#30. I thought my life was over and my heart was broken.
Then I moved to Cambridge.
Louise Gluck
#31. At first I saw you everywhere. Now only in certain things, at longer intervals.
Louise Gluck
#32. Panic is a synonym for being; in its delays, in its swerving and rushing syntax, its frantic lists and questions, it fends off time and loss. Its opposite is oblivion: not the tranquil oblivion of sleep but the threatening oblivions of sex and death.
Louise Gluck
#33. She can't remember herself as that person
but she keeps thinking the pool will remember
and explain to her the meaning of her prayer
so she can understand
whether it was answered or not.
Louise Gluck
#34. Siken occasionally locates a poem in loss as enacted, not implicit, event. These are among his most beautiful poems, their capitulations heartbreaking in the context of prolonged animal struggle against acknowledgement.
Louise Gluck
#35. It seems to me in the past it's been a good thing, as a writer, to have experiences I hadn't expected.
Louise Gluck
#36. I am suspicious of my existing ideas, my conscious thoughts and convictions. They are what I need to get beyond, into ignorance and after that, with luck, discovery.
Louise Gluck
#38. Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary,
imperial joy and sorrow of human existence,
the dreamed as well as the lived
what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?
Louise Gluck
#39. A word drops into the mist
like a child's ball into high grass
where it remains seductively
flashing and glinting until
the gold bursts are revealed to be
simply field buttercups.
Word/mist, word/mist: thus it was with me.
Louise Gluck
#40. The master said You must write what you see.
But what I see does not move me.
The master answered Change what you see.
Louise Gluck
#41. Even before you touched me, I belonged to you; all you had to do was look at me.
Louise Gluck
#42. Like a child, the earth's going to sleep,
or so the story goes.
But I'm not tired, it says.
And the mother says, You may not be tired but I'm tired
Louise Gluck
#44. Honor the words that enter and attach to your brain.
Louise Gluck
#46. It is very difficult to win. It's not in my script.
Louise Gluck
#47. Whatever/ returns from oblivion/ returns to find a voice.
Louise Gluck
#48. How can I know you love me
unless I see you grieve over me?
Louise Gluck
#49. Dear friend,
dear trembling partner, what
surprises you most in what you feel,
earth's radiance or your own delight?
For me, always
the delight is the surprise.
Louise Gluck
#50. You get on a train, you disappear.
You write your name on the window, you disappear.
There are places like this everywhere,
places you enter as a young girl
from which you never return.
Louise Gluck
#52. I am tired of having hands
she said
I want wings
But what will you do without your hands
to be human?
I am tired of human
she said
I want to live on the sun -
Louise Gluck
#53. I had nothing and I was still changed. Like a costume, my numbness was taken away. Then hunger was added.
Louise Gluck
#54. Lived to see you throwing
Me aside. That fought
like netted fish inside me. Saw you throbbing
In my syrups. Saw you sleep. And lived to see
That all flushed down
The refuse. Done?
It lives in me.
You live in me. Malignant.
Love, you ever want me, don't.
Louise Gluck
#55. The air had become heavy, not because it had greater substance, but because there was nothing left to breathe.
Louise Gluck
#56. I think I can remember being dead. Many times, in winter, I approached Zeus. Tell me, I would ask him, how can I endure the earth?
Louise Gluck
#57. Why love what you will lose?
There is nothing else to love.
Louise Gluck
#58. I don't live with earplugs. I don't like the spotlight - but I like overhearing conversations.
Louise Gluck
#59. In my dream, I built a funeral pyre.
For myself, you understand.
I thought I had suffered enough. I thought this was the end of my body: fire
seemed the right end for hunger;
they were the same thing.
Louise Gluck
#60. We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.
Louise Gluck
#61. We live in a period of great polarities: in art, in public policy, in morality. In poetry, art seems, at one extreme, rhymed good manners, and at the other, chaos.
Louise Gluck
#62. And he lay on the cold floor of the study watching the wind stirring the pages, mixing the written and unwritten, the end among them.
Louise Gluck
#63. Come to me said the world. I was standing
in my wool coat at a kind of bright portal
I can finally say
long ago; it gives me considerable pleasure. Beauty
the healer, the teacher
death cannot harm me
more than you have harmed me,
my beloved life.
Louise Gluck
#64. What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word's setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word's full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise.
Louise Gluck
#65. Sounds weren't coming out of my mouth. And yet they were in my head, expressed, possibly, as something less exact, thought perhaps, though at the time they still seemed like sounds to me.
Louise Gluck
#66. Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer.
Louise Gluck
#68. Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond
surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects
to which my predecessors apprenticed themselves.
I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.
Louise Gluck
#69. I pretended indifference ... even in the presence of love, in the presence of hunger. And the more deeply I felt, the less able I was to respond.
Louise Gluck
#70. The assignment was to fall in love.
The details were up to you.
The second part was
to include in the poem certain words,
words drawn from a specific text
on another subject altogether.
Louise Gluck
#71. To raise the veil. To see what you're saying goodbye to.
Louise Gluck
#72. It is true that there is not enough beauty in the world.
It is also true that I am not competent to restore it.
Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.
Louise Gluck
#73. From the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.
Louise Gluck
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