Louise Glück Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.”
-- Louise Glück -
“I had nothing and I was still changed. Like a costume, my numbness was taken away. Then hunger was added.”
-- Louise Glück -
“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 -
“From the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.”
-- Louise Glück -
“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 -
“The soul is silent. If it speaks at all it speaks in dreams.”
-- Louise Glück -
“The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last.”
-- Louise Glück -
“The great thing is not having a mind. Feelings: oh, I have those; they govern me.”
-- Louise Glück -
“At first I saw you everywhere. Now only in certain things, at longer intervals.”
-- Louise Glück -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“That's why I'm not to be trusted. Because a wound to the heart is also a wound to the mind”
-- Louise Glück -
“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 -
“You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you.”
-- Louise Glück -
“At the end of my suffering/there was a door.”
-- Louise Glück -
“To raise the veil. To see what you're saying goodbye to.”
-- Louise Glück -
“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 -
“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 -
“What was difficult was the travel, which, on arrival, is forgotten.”
-- Louise Glück -
“Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer.”
-- Louise Glück -
“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 -
“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 -
“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
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