Quotes by Louise Glück - Page 1

Birth, not death, is the hard loss.
Louise Glück / Poet
Birth
Hard
Loss
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I preferred the simplest vocabulary.
Louise Glück / Poet
Simplest
Vocabulary
Preferred
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Intense love always leads to mourning.
Louise Glück / Poet
Intense
Intense Love
Mourning
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The love of form is a love of endings.
Louise Glück / Poet
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The unsaid, for me, exerts great power.
Louise Glück / Poet
Great Power
Unsaid
Writing
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I have no concern with widening audience.
Louise Glück / Poet
Concern
Widening
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At the end of my suffering/there was a door.
Louise Glück / Poet
Doors
Ends
Suffering
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Honor the words that enter and attach to your brain.
Louise Glück / Poet
Brain
Honor
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To raise the veil. To see what you're saying goodbye to.
Louise Glück / Poet
Goodbye
Saying Goodbye
Veils
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Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer.
Louise Glück / Poet
Sister
Dancer
Funny Sibling
Two
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We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.
Louise Glück / Poet
Childhood
Looks
Memories
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The soul is silent. If it speaks at all it speaks in dreams.
Louise Glück / Poet
Dream
Soul
Speak
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You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you.
Louise Glück / Poet
Despair
Should Have
Winter
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What was difficult was the travel, which, on arrival, is forgotten.
Louise Glück / Poet
Travel
Forgotten
Memorable
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At first I saw you everywhere. Now only in certain things, at longer intervals.
Louise Glück / Poet
Certain
Firsts
Saws
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The great thing is not having a mind. Feelings: oh, I have those; they govern me.
Louise Glück / Poet
Feelings
Great Things
Mind
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The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last.
Louise Glück / Poet
Lasts
Life Is
May
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That's why I'm not to be trusted. Because a wound to the heart is also a wound to the mind
Louise Glück / Poet
Heart
Mind
Trusted
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I don't live with earplugs. I don't like the spotlight - but I like overhearing conversations.
Louise Glück / Poet
Spotlight
Conversations
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It seems to me in the past it's been a good thing, as a writer, to have experiences I hadn't expected.
Louise Glück / Poet
Good Me Past
Good Thing
In The Past
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From the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.
Louise Glück / Poet
Childhood
Pain
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Toward his critics, the artist harbors a defensive ace: knowledge that the future will erase the present.
Louise Glück / Poet
Critics
Erase
Harbors
Ace
Defensive
Toward
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I had nothing and I was still changed. Like a costume, my numbness was taken away. Then hunger was added.
Louise Glück / Poet
Costumes
Numbness
Taken
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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 Glück / Poet
Doe
Moving
Writing
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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 Glück / Poet
Children
Light
Sadness
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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 Glück / Poet
Earth
Thinking
Winter
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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 Glück / Poet
Able
Hunger
Indifference
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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 Glück / Poet
Children
Mother
Tired
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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 Glück / Poet
Joy
Night
Summer
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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 Glück / Poet
Appetite
Disturbing
Ideas
Novelty
Seems
Unfolding
Me New Ideas
Cultural
Laureate
Predecessor
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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 Glück / Poet
Answers
Mind
Self
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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 Glück / Poet
Echoes
Heart
Loneliness
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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 Glück / Poet
Hurt
Love You
Lying
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I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen.
Louise Glück / Poet
Silence
Vocabulary
Wish
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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 Glück / Poet
Pacing
Range
Setting
Surprising
Timing
Liberate
Page
Poem
Subtleties
Suited
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As I saw it, all my mother's life, my father held her down, like lead strapped to her ankles. She was buoyant by nature; she wanted to travel, go to the theater, go to museums. What he wanted was to lie on the couch with the Times over his face, so that death, when it came, wouldn't seem a significant change.
Louise Glück / Poet
Father
Lying
Mother
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So you couldn't protect yourself? The absolute erodes; the boundary, the wall around the self erodes. If I was waiting I had been invaded by time. But do you think you're free? I think I recognize the patterns of my nature. Bud do you think you're free? I had nothing and I was still changed. Like a costume, my numbness was taken away. Then hunger was added.
Louise Glück / Poet
Taken
Thinking
Wall
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Tonight I saw myself in the dark window as the image of my father, whose life was spent like this, thinking of death, to the exclusion of other sensual matters, so in the end that life was easy to give up, since it contained nothing: even my mother's voice couldn't make him change or turn back as he believed that once you can't love another human being you have no place in the world.
Louise Glück / Poet
Father
Giving Up
Mother
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I caution you as I was never cautioned: You will never let go, you will never be satiated. You will be damaged and scarred, you will continue to hunger. Your body will age, you will continue to need. You will want the earth, then more of the earth-- Sublime, indifferent, it is present, it will not respond. It is encompassing, it will not minister. Meaning, it will feed you, it will ravish you. It will not keep you alive.
Louise Glück / Poet
Age
Letting Go
Sublime
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The Red Poppy The great thing is not having a mind. Feelings: oh, I have those; they govern me. I have a lord in heaven called the sun, and open for him, showing him the fire of my own heart, fire like his presence. What could such glory be if not a heart? Oh my brothers and sisters, were you like me once, long ago, before you were human? Did you permit yourselves to open once, who would never open again? Because in truth I am speaking now the way you do. I speak because I am shattered.
Louise Glück / Poet
Brother
Fire
Heart
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It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing, a restlessness sometimes, but not inevitably, played out romantically, or sexually. Always there seems something ahead, the next poem or story, visible, at least, apprehensible, but unreachable. To perceive it at all is to be haunted by it; some sound, some tone, becomes a torment — the poem embodying that sound seems to exist somewhere already finished. It’s like a lighthouse, except that, as one swims towards it, it backs away.
Louise Glück / Poet
Art
Desire
Swim
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Without thinking, I knelt in the grass, like someone meaning to pray. When I tried to stand again, I couldn't move, my legs were utterly rigid. Does grief change you like that? Through the birches, I could see the pond. The sun was cutting small white holes in the water. I got up finally; I walked down to the pond. I stood there, brushing the grass from my skirt, watching myself, like a girl after her first lover turning slowly at the bathroom mirror, naked, looking for a sign. But nakedness in women is always a pose. I was not transfigured. I would never be free.
Louise Glück / Poet
Girl
Grief
Moving
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Louise Glück Quotes - Page 1

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