Gluck Quotes

When you have a movie about people landing from planet Neptune, you suspend disbelief. I totally get it. But I like doing things that happen in real life. ~ Will Gluck

Why love what you will lose?
There is nothing else to love. ~ Louise Gluck

You must be taught to love me. Human beings must be taught to love
silence and darkness. ~ Louise Gluck

What was difficult
was the travel, which,
on arrival, is forgotten. ~ Louise Gluck

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

When you people have a set up joke and the joke is set up straight and the words are just well written, I always say "C'mon, humans don't speak that way." ~ Will Gluck

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

How can I know you love me
unless I see you grieve over me? ~ Louise Gluck

Whatever/ returns from oblivion/ returns to find a voice. ~ Louise Gluck

Did I? Daniel said. While we're here. Well. While we're here, let's just always hold out hope for the person who says it.
Says what, Mr Gluck? Elisabeth said.
Sure you want war? Daniel said. ~ Ali Smith

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

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

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

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

The sexual act - thinking about the sexual act, the telling about the sexual act, after the sexual act, is so much more important than the actual sexual act - just in time. It's like of the whole sexual act, you probably spend 95% of the time thinking about it, talking about it afterwards. The actually sexual act, especially when you're 17, is minutes. ~ Will Gluck

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

They say
there is a rift in the human soul
which was not constructed to belong
entirely to life. ~ Louise Gluck

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

And then, suddenly, something is over. ~ Louise Gluck

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

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

I like doing character movies. I like doing movies about personal situations; that's what I love about dealing with things. ~ Will Gluck

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

Intense love always leads to mourning. ~ Louise Gluck

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

From the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved. ~ Louise Gluck

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

People in movies and TV seem to be completely dumb to what's going on in the real world and relationships. ~ Will Gluck

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

When I did TV shows and my other movies, I never try to do it for anybody. I just do what I think is good no matter what the genre is. ~ Will Gluck

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

To me, the big difference is when you yell cut and then you have to walk over there and deliver a note, it gives it much more import as opposed to "Hey, try that." It's just much more intimate, I think. ~ Will Gluck

Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer. ~ Louise Gluck

How privileged you are, to be
passionately
clinging to what you love;
the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you. ~ Louise Gluck

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

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

We are rich in the quantity of songs rather than in the quality. The singer has to go through hundreds of compositions before he finds one that really says something. ~ Alma Gluck

I don't live with earplugs. I don't like the spotlight - but I like overhearing conversations. ~ Louise Gluck

The real artist has no idea that he is sacrificing himself for art. He does what he does for one reason and one reason only-he can't help doing it. ~ Alma Gluck

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

Toward his critics, the artist harbors a defensive ace: knowledge that the future will erase the present. ~ Louise Gluck

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

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

Even before you touched me, I belonged to you; all you had to do was look at me. ~ Louise Gluck

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

Dear bad animal
Dear caged thing
There was something about you. ~ Louise Gluck

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

French is, in many ways, more difficult for an English-speaking person to sing. It is so full of complex and trying vowels. It requires the utmost subtlety. ~ Alma Gluck

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

There are not that many roles in comedies that are completely driven by a young actress. ~ Will Gluck

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

I have no concern with widening audience. ~ Louise Gluck

I thought my life was over and my heart was broken.

Then I moved to Cambridge. ~ Louise Gluck

Time and again, a student will send me an urgent appeal to hear her, saying she is poor and wants my advice as to whether it is worthwhile to continue her studies. I invariably refuse such requests, saying that if the student could give up her work on my advice, she had better give it up without it. ~ Alma Gluck

The powerful are always lied to since the weak are always driven to panic ~ Louise Gluck

A student will send me an urgent appeal to hear her, saying she is poor and wants my advice as to whether it is worth while to continue her studies. I invariably refuse such requests. ~ Alma Gluck

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

I don't like having characters as props. I never want a character to be a prop. ~ Will Gluck

It is very difficult to win. It's not in my script. ~ Louise Gluck

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

I don't think anyone says "Wow, the best sex I ever had was when I was 16 years old." ~ Will Gluck

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

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

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

The truth, first encountered on that day, was this: there was a well inside her, the water in that well was poisoned, and when he goosed her, William had sent a bucket down there, one which had come up filled with scum and squirming gluck. ~ Stephen King

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

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

We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory. ~ Louise Gluck

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

The unsaid, for me, exerts great power... ~ Louise Gluck

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

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

I put so much pop culture in my movies because we speak about pop culture all the time. But, for some reason, movies exist in a world where there's no pop culture. ~ Will Gluck

I like doing movies about personal situations; that's what I love about dealing with things. I don't like superhero things, I like real-people things. ~ Will Gluck

I preferred the simplest vocabulary. ~ Louise Gluck

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

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

One does not study for a goal. One sings because one can't help it! The 'goal' nine times out of ten is a mere accident. ~ Alma Gluck

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

Salieri was a pupil of Gluck. He was born in Italy in 1750 and died in Vienna in 1825. He left Italy when he was 16 and spent most of his life in Vienna. He's the key composer between classic music and romantic music. Beethoven was the beginning of romantic music, and he was the teacher of Beethoven and Schubert. ~ Cecilia Bartoli

To raise the veil. To see what you're saying goodbye to. ~ Louise Gluck

You have no idea how shocking it is to a child when something continuous stops. ~ Louise Gluck

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

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

The love of form is a love of endings. ~ Louise Gluck

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

Enron followed the unwise practice of paying bonuses based on forecasted profits, not actual cash flows, a system that posed a problem remarkably similar to the R&D issues Gluck and his colleagues had solved at Northern Electric years earlier. In short: You can forecast anything. Delivering actual results is a different story. The emphasis on forecasts also neutralized Enron's so-called risk-management group, which became a shrinking violet in the face of ever more outrageous estimates. ~ Duff McDonald

If the student could give up her work on my advice, she had better give it up without it. One does not study for a goal. The goal is a mere accident. ~ Alma Gluck

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

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

Gluck asserted that the poor were not simple downtrodden innocents as the Santa Claus Association had for years presented them. They were time bombs, ready to detonate as soon as conditions worsened. He suggested to Tumulty that the United States create a surveillance system that would "keep tabs" on the poor, and poor Germans in particular, without their knowledge - and that he should oversee the whole thing. ~ Alex Palmer

At first I saw you everywhere. Now only in certain things, at longer intervals. ~ Louise Gluck

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

In the piano, one has the instrument complete before he begins; but in the case of the voice, the instrument has to be developed by study. ~ Alma Gluck

The sincerity of the art worker must permeate the song as naturally as the green leaves break through the dead branches in springtime. ~ Alma Gluck

They sat far apart
deliberately, to experience, daily,
the sweetness of seeing each other across
great distance. ~ Louise Gluck

She has the look of one who seeks
some greater and destroying passion ~ Louise Gluck

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

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

things
that can't move
learn to see ~ Louise Gluck