Louise Glück > Quotes

“Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer.”
― Louise Glück

“We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.”
― Louise Glück

“From the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.”
― 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

“Intense love always leads to mourning.”
― Louise Glück, Triumph of Achilles

“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

“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

“At first I saw you everywhere.
Now only in certain things,
at longer intervals.”
― Louise Glück

“The soul is silent. If it speaks at all it speaks in dreams.”
― Louise Glück, It Is Daylight

“To raise the veil.
To see what you're saying goodbye to.”
― 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, The Seven Ages

“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

“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

“What was difficult
was the travel, which,
on arrival, is forgotten.”
― 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, The Seven Ages

“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

“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 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

“The unsaid, for me, exerts great power...”
― 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

“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, Averno

“...whatever/ returns from oblivion/ returns to find a voice.”
― Louise Glück, The Wild Iris

“The great thing
is not having
a mind. Feelings:
oh, I have those;
they govern me.”
― Louise Glück

“Why love what you will lose? / There is nothing else to love.”
― Louise Glück, Triumph of Achilles

“جُرحتُ، منذ زمن بعيد.
وعشتُ لكي أثأر لنفسي
من والدي، ليس
بسبب ما كان عليه،
بل بسبب ما أنا عليه: منذ بدء الزمن
أيّام الطفولة، فكّرتُ
أنّ الألم يعني
أنني لم أكن محبوبة،
أنني كنتُ أحبّ.”
― Louise Glück

“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, Proofs and Theories

“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 Glück, The Wild Iris

“We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory. from Nostos.”
― Louise Glück

“crying yes risk joy”
― Louise Glück, The Wild Iris

“Tell me this is the future,
I won’t believe you.
Tell me I’m living,
I won’t believe you.”
― Louise Glück