Louise Gluck Quotes

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You saved me, you should remember me.

The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats.
Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms.

When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling.

I remember sounds like that from my childhood,
laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful,
something like that.

Lugano. Tables under the apple trees.
Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags.
And by the lake's edge, a young man throws his hat into the water;
perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him.

Crucial
sounds or gestures like
a track laid down before the larger themes

and then unused, buried.

Islands in the distance. My mother
holding out a plate of little cakes -

as far as I remember, changed
in no detail, the moment
vivid, intact, having never been
exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age
hungry for life, utterly confident -

By the tables, patches of new grass, the pale green
pieced into the dark existing ground.

Surely spring has been returned to me, this time
not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet
it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly.
Louise Gluck Quotes: You saved me, you should
To raise the veil. To see what you're saying goodbye to.
Louise Gluck Quotes: To raise the veil. To
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 Quotes: Lived to see you throwing<br>Me
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 Gluck Quotes: As I saw it, <br>all
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 Quotes: I am suspicious of my
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 Quotes: I fell asleep in a
Why love what you will lose?
There is nothing else to love.
Louise Gluck Quotes: Why love what you will
In the silence of consciousness I asked myself:
why did I reject my life? And I answer
Die Erde überwältigt mich:
the earth defeats me.
Louise Gluck Quotes: In the silence of consciousness
Snowdrops

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know
what despair is; then
winter should have meaning for you.

I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn't expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body
able to respond again, remembering
after so long how to open again
in the cold light
of earliest spring -

afraid, yes, but among you again
crying yes risk joy

in the raw wind of the new world.
Louise Gluck Quotes: Snowdrops<br /><br />Do you know
And then, suddenly, something is over.
Louise Gluck Quotes: And then, suddenly, something is
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 Quotes: Once I could imagine my
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 Quotes: Doesn't everyone want to feel
Even before you touched me, I belonged to you; all you had to do was look at me.
Louise Gluck Quotes: Even before you touched me,
Poetry survives because it haunts and it haunts because it is simultaneously utterly clear and deeply mysterious; because it cannot be entirely accounted for, it cannot be exhausted.
Louise Gluck Quotes: Poetry survives because it haunts
We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.
Louise Gluck Quotes: We look at the world
Horse

What does the horse give you
That I cannot give you?

I watch you when you are alone,
When you ride into the field behind the dairy,
Your hands buried in the mare's
Dark mane.

Then I know what lies behind your silence:
Scorn, hatred of me, of marriage. Still,
You want me to touch you; you cry out
As brides cry, but when I look at you I see
There are no children in your body.
Then what is there?

Nothing, I think. Only haste
To die before I die.

In a dream, I watched you ride the horse
Over the dry fields and then
Dismount: you two walked together;
In the dark, you had no shadows.
But I felt them coming toward me
Since at night they go anywhere,
They are their own masters.

Look at me. You think I don't understand?
What is the animal
If not passage out of this life?
Louise Gluck Quotes: Horse<br /><br />What does the
Vespers

In your extended absence, you permit me
use of earth, anticipating
some return on investment. I must report
failure in my assignment, principally
regarding the tomato plants.
I think I should not be encouraged to grow
tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold
the heavy rains, the cold nights that come
so often here, while other regions get
twelve weeks of summer. All this
belongs to you: on the other hand,
I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart
broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly
multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of
that term. You who do not discriminate
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,
immune to foreshadowing, you may not know
how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf,
the red leaves of the maple falling
even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible
for these vines.
Louise Gluck Quotes: Vespers<br /><br />In your extended
Living things don't all require
light in the same degree. Some of us
make our own light: a silver leaf
like a path no one can use, a shallow
lake of silver in the darkness under the great maples.
But you know this already.
You and the others who think
you live for truth and, by extension, love
all that is cold.
Louise Gluck Quotes: Living things don't all require<br>light
I watched the first shoots
like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart
broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly
multiplying in the rows. I doubt
you have a heart, in our understanding of
that term. You who do not discriminate
between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence,
immune to foreshadowing ...
Louise Gluck Quotes: I watched the first shoots
As I turned over the last page, a wave of sorrow enveloped me. Where had they all gone, these people who had seemed so real? To distract myself, I walked out into the night; instinctively, I lit a cigarette. In the dark, the cigarette glowed, like a fire lit by a survivor. But who would see this light, this small dot among infinite stars? I stood awhile in the dark, the cigarette glowing and growing small, each breath patiently destroying me. How small it was, how brief. Brief, brief, but inside me now, which the stars could never be.
Louise Gluck Quotes: As I turned over the
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 Gluck Quotes: Tonight I saw myself in
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 Gluck Quotes: I caution you as I
You must be taught to love me. Human beings must be taught to love
silence and darkness.
Louise Gluck Quotes: You must be taught to
Long, long ago, before I was a tormented artist, afflicted with longing yet incapable of forming durable attachments, long before this, I was a glorious ruler uniting all of a divided country - so I was told by the fortune-teller who examined my palm. Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps behind you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the difference? Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the rest is hypothesis and dream.
Louise Gluck Quotes: Long, long ago, before I
I thought my life was over and my heart was broken.

Then I moved to Cambridge.
Louise Gluck Quotes: I thought my life was
She has the look of one who seeks
some greater and destroying passion
Louise Gluck Quotes: She has the look of
This is the end, isn't it?
And you are here with me again, listening with me: the sea
no longer torments me; the self
I wished to be is the self I am.
Louise Gluck Quotes: This is the end, isn't
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 Quotes: The assignment was to fall
I don't live with earplugs. I don't like the spotlight - but I like overhearing conversations.
Louise Gluck Quotes: I don't live with earplugs.
They sat far apart
deliberately, to experience, daily,
the sweetness of seeing each other across
great distance.
Louise Gluck Quotes: They sat far apart<br>deliberately, to
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 Quotes: Sounds weren't coming out of
Gretel in Darkness:


This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch's cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas....

Now, far from women's arms
And memory of women, in our father's hut
we sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
summer afternoons you look at me as though
you meant to leave,
as though it never happened.
But I killed for you. I see armed firs,
the spires of that gleaming kiln--

Nights I turn to you to hold me
but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel
we are there still, and it is real, real,
that black forest, and the fire in earnest.
Louise Gluck Quotes: Gretel in Darkness:<br /><br /><br
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 Quotes: And he lay on the
The Triumph Of Achilles

In the story of Patroclus
no one survives, not even Achilles
who was nearly a god.
Patroclus resembled him; they wore
the same armor.

Always in these friendships
one serves the other, one is less than the other:
the hierarchy
is always apparent, though the legends
cannot be trusted--
their source is the survivor,
the one who has been abandoned.

What were the Greek ships on fire
compared to this loss?

In his tent, Achilles
grieved with his whole being
and the gods saw
he was a man already dead, a victim
of the part that loved,
the part that was mortal.
Louise Gluck Quotes: The Triumph Of Achilles<br /><br
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 Quotes: It seems to me in
How privileged you are, to be
passionately
clinging to what you love;
the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.
Louise Gluck Quotes: How privileged you are, to
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 Quotes: It had occurred to me
The air had become heavy, not because it had greater substance, but because there was nothing left to breathe.
Louise Gluck Quotes: The air had become heavy,
You stand as rocks stand
to which the sea reaches
in transparent waves of longing;
they are marred, finally;
everything fixed is marred.
And the sea triumphs,
like all that is false,
all that is fluent and womanly.
Louise Gluck Quotes: You stand as rocks stand
In the silence of my consciousness I asked myself: why did I reject my life? And I answer Die Erder überwältigt mich: the earth defeats me. I have tried to be accurate in this description in case someone else should follow me. I can verify that when the sun sets in winter it is incomparably beautiful and the memory of it lasts a long time. I think this means there was no night. The night was in my head.
Louise Gluck Quotes: In the silence of my
End of Winter"

Over the still world, a bird calls
waking solitary among black boughs.

You wanted to be born; I let you be born.
When has my grief ever gotten
in the way of your pleasure?

Plunging ahead
into the dark and light at the same time
eager for sensation

as though you were some new thing, wanting
to express yourselves

all brilliance, all vivacity
never thinking
this would cost you anything,
never imagining the sound of my voice
as anything but part of you -

you won't hear it in the other world,
not clearly again,
not in birdcall or human cry,

not the clear sound, only
persistent echoing
in all sound that means good-bye, good-bye -

the one continuous line
that binds us to each other.
Louise Gluck Quotes: End of Winter
Summer after summer has ended,
balm after violence:
it does me no good to be good to me now;
violence has changed me.
Louise Gluck Quotes: Summer after summer has ended,<br
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 Quotes: What I responded to, on
Look at her, touching his cheek
to make a truce, her fingers
cool with spring rain;
in thin grass, bursts of purple crocus -

even here, even at the beginning of love,
her hand leaving his face makes
an image of departure

and they think
they are free to overlook
this sadness.
Louise Gluck Quotes: Look at her, touching his
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 Quotes: In my dream, I built
Dear bad animal
Dear caged thing
There was something about you.
Louise Gluck Quotes: Dear bad animal <br />Dear
The sound of the sea - just memory now.
Louise Gluck Quotes: The sound of the sea
The powerful are always lied to since the weak are always driven to panic
Louise Gluck Quotes: The powerful are always lied
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 Quotes: Dear friend,<br>dear trembling partner, what<br>surprises
Because you were foolish enough to love one place,
now you are homeless, an orphan
in a succession of shelters.
You did not prepare yourself sufficiently.
Before your eyes, two people were becoming old;
I could have told you two deaths were coming.
There has never been a parent
kept alive by a child's love.

Now, of course, it's too late –
you were trapped in the romance of fidelity.
You kept going back, clinging
to two people you hardly recognized
after what they'd endured.

If once you could have saved yourself,
now that time's past: you were obstinate, pathetically
blind to change. Now you have nothing:
for you, home is a cemetery.
I've seen you press your face against the granite markers –
you are the lichen, trying to grow there.
But you will not grow,
you will not let yourself
obliterate anything.
Louise Gluck Quotes: Because you were foolish enough
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 Quotes: Tell me, the poet says,
The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those;
they govern me.
Louise Gluck Quotes: The great thing<br>is not having<br>a
Whatever/ returns from oblivion/ returns to find a voice.
Louise Gluck Quotes: Whatever/ returns from oblivion/ returns
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 Quotes: Desire, loneliness, wind in the
How can I know you love me
unless I see you grieve over me?
Louise Gluck Quotes: How can I know you
Intense love always leads to mourning.
Louise Gluck Quotes: Intense love always leads to
Toward his critics, the artist harbors a defensive ace: knowledge that the future will erase the present.
Louise Gluck Quotes: Toward his critics, the artist
The unsaid, for me, exerts great power...
Louise Gluck Quotes: The unsaid, for me, exerts
It is very difficult to win. It's not in my script.
Louise Gluck Quotes: It is very difficult to
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 Quotes: I think here I will
At first I saw you everywhere. Now only in certain things, at longer intervals.
Louise Gluck Quotes: At first I saw you
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 Gluck Quotes: The Red Poppy<br /><br />The
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 Quotes: Writing is a kind of
I preferred the simplest vocabulary.
Louise Gluck Quotes: I preferred the simplest vocabulary.
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 Quotes: A word drops into the
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 Quotes: 17. The self ended and
From the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.
Louise Gluck Quotes: From the beginning of time,
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 Quotes: I think I can remember
Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer.
Louise Gluck Quotes: Of two sisters one is
UTOPIA When the train stops, the woman said, you must get on it. But how will I know, the child asked, it is the right train? It will be the right train, said the woman, because it is the right time. A train approached the station; clouds of grayish smoke streamed from the chimney. How terrified I am, the child thinks, clutching the yellow tulips she will give to her grandmother. Her hair has been tightly braided to withstand the journey. Then, without a word, she gets on the train, from which a strange sound comes, not in a language like the one she speaks, something more like a moan or a cry.
Louise Gluck Quotes: UTOPIA When the train stops,
Nothing in the past can be changed or restored. But the present can change the way it is thought about. In this new enactment, presence can replace absence, which is the best that can be managed in human time.
Louise Gluck Quotes: Nothing in the past can
They say
there is a rift in the human soul
which was not constructed to belong
entirely to life.
Louise Gluck Quotes: They say<br />there is a
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 Quotes: I am tired of having
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 Quotes: You know, he said, our
The Fear of Burial
In the empty field, in the morning,
the body waits to be claimed.
The spirit sits beside it, on a small rock
nothing comes to give it form again.
Think of the body's loneliness.
At night pacing the sheared field,
its shadow buckled tightly around.
Such a long journey.
And already the remote, trembling lights of the village
not pausing for it as they scan the rows.
How far away they seem,
the wooden doors, the bread and milk
laid like weights on the table.
Louise Gluck Quotes: The Fear of Burial<br>In the
You have no idea how shocking it is to a child when something continuous stops.
Louise Gluck Quotes: You have no idea how
The Mountain

My students look at me expectantly.
I explain to them that the life of art is a life
of endless labor. Their expressions
hardly change; they need to know
a little more about endless labor.
So I tell them the story of Sisyphus,
how he was doomed to push
a rock up a mountain, knowing nothing
would come of this effort
but that he would repeat it
indefinitely. I tell them
there is joy in this, in the artist's life,
that one eludes
judgment, and as I speak
I am secretly pushing a rock myself,
slyly pushing it up the steep
face of a mountain. Why do I lie
to these children? They aren't listening,
they aren't deceived, their fingers
tapping at the wooden desks -
So I retract
the myth; I tell them it occurs
in hell, and that the artist lies
because he is obsessed with attainment,
that he perceives the summit
as that place where he will live forever,
a place about to be
transformed by his burden: with every breath,
I am standing at the top of the mountain.
Both my hands are free. And the rock has added
height to the mountain.
Louise Gluck Quotes: The Mountain<br /><br />My students
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 Quotes: The master said You must
Celestial Music"

I have a friend who still believes in heaven.
Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to god,
she thinks someone listens in heaven.
On earth, she's unusually competent.
Brave, too, able to face unpleasantness.

We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it.
I'm always moved by weakness, by disaster, always eager to oppose vitality.
But timid, also, quick to shut my eyes.
Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out
according to nature. For my sake, she intervened,
brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down
across the road.

My friend says I shut my eyes to god, that nothing else explains
my aversion to reality. She says 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 -
My friend is like the mother. Patient, urging me
to wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person -

In my dreams, my friend reproaches me. We're walking
on the same road, except it's winter now;
she's telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial music:
look up, she says. When I look up, nothing.
Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees
like brides leaping to a great height -
Then I'm afraid for her; I see her
caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth -
Louise Gluck Quotes: Celestial Music
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You grew up, you were struck by lightning.
When you opened your eyes, you were wired forever to your true love.

It only happened once. Then you were taken care of,
your story was finished.
Louise Gluck Quotes: You grew up, you were
All day I tried to distinguish
need from desire. Now, in the dark,
I feel only bitter sadness for us,
the builders, the planers of wood,
because I have been looking
steadily at these elms
and seen the process that creates
the writhing, stationary tree
is torment, and have understood
it will make no forms but twisted forms.
Louise Gluck Quotes: All day I tried to
What was difficult
was the travel, which,
on arrival, is forgotten.
Louise Gluck Quotes: What was difficult<br>was the travel,
things
that can't move
learn to see
Louise Gluck Quotes: things<br />that can't move<br />learn
The love of form is a love of endings.
Louise Gluck Quotes: The love of form is
I have no concern with widening audience.
Louise Gluck Quotes: I have no concern with
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