The Seven Ages Quotes

“I was not prepared: sunset, end of summer. Demonstrations
of time as a continuum, as something coming to an end,

not a suspension: the senses wouldn’t protect me.
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, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“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, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“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 Gluck, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“And then fall was gone, the year was gone.
We were changing, we were growing up. But
it wasn't something you decided to do;
it was something that happened, something
you couldn't control.

Time was passing. Time was carrying us
faster and faster toward the door of the laboratory,
and then beyond the door into the abyss, the darkness.
My mother stirred the soup. The onions,
by a miracle, became part of the potatoes.”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“I was a winged obsessive, my moonlit
feathers were paper. I lived hardly at all among men and women;

I spoke only to angels. How fortunate my days,
how charged and meaningful the nights’ continuous silence and opacity.

— Louise Glück, from “Ancient Text,” The Seven Ages. (Ecco; Reprint edition March 26, 2002) Originally published 2000.”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“And if when I wrote I used only a few words
it was because time always seemed to me short
as though it could be stripped away
at any moment.

And my story, in any case, wasn't unique
though, like everyone else, I had a story,
a point of view.

A few words were all I needed:
nourish, sustain, attack.”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“I needed nothing more; I was utterly sated.
My heart had become small; it took very little to fill it.
I watched the rain falling in heavy sheets over the darkened city-”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“Was it the sea? Responding, maybe,
to celestial force? To be safe,
I prayed. I tried to be a better person.
Soon it seemed to me that what began as terror and matured into moral narcissism might have become in fact
actual human growth. Maybe
this is what my friends meant, taking my hand, telling me they understood
the abuse, the incredible shit I accepted,
implying (so I once thought) I was a little sick
to give so much for so little.
Whereas they meant I was good (clasping my hand intensely)
a good friend and person, not a creature of pathos.”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“I asked for much; I received much.
I asked for much; I received little, I received
next to nothing.

And between? A few umbrellas opened indoors.
A pair of shoes by mistake on the kitchen table.”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“We were supposed to be, all of us,
a circle, a line at every point
equally weighted or tensed, equally
close to the center. I saw it
differently. In my mind, my parents
were the circle; my sister and I
were trapped inside.”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“The birthday was over. I was thinking, naturally, about time.
I remember how, in almost the same instant, my heart would leap up exultant and collapse
in desolate anguish. The leaping up -the half I didn't count-
that was happiness; that is what the word meant.”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“A world in process
of shifting, of being made or dissolved,
and yet we didn't live that way;
all of us lived our lives
as the simultaneous ritualized enactment
of a great principle,
something felt but not understood.
And the remarks we made were like lines in a play,
spoken with conviction but not from choice.”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“I even loved a few times in my disgusting human way.”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“The curtains parted. Light
coming in. Moonlight, then sunlight.
Not changing because time was passing
but because the one moment had many aspects.”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“I call to you across a monstrous river or chasm
to caution you, to prepare you.
Earth will seduce you, slowly, imperceptibly,
subtly, not to say with connivance...
Solace, then deep immersion.
I loved nothing more: deep privacy of the sensual life,
the self disappearing into it or inseparable from it,
somehow suspended, floating, its needs
fully exposed, awakened, fully alive...
I caution you as I was never cautioned:
you will never let go, you will never be satiated.
You will be damages 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...
It will feed you, it will ravish you,
it will not keep you alive.
- From The Sensual World”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“And as my life was, in a sense, increasingly given over to prayer, so the task of the angels was, I believe, to master this language in which they were not as yet entirely fluent or confident.”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“You were

a beast at the edge of its cave, only
waking and sleeping. Then
the minute shift; the eye

taken by something.
Spring: the unforeseen
flooding the abyss.

And the life
filling again.
And finally
a place
found for everything.”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“Our lives were stored in our heads.
They hadn't begun; we were both sure
we'd know when they did.
They certainly weren't this.”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“Frustration, rage, the terrible wounded pride
of rebuffed love - I remember

rising from the earth to heaven. I remember
I had two parents,
one harsh, one invisible. Poor
clouded father, who worked
only in gold and silver.”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“I loved once, I loved twice,
and even though in our case
things never got off the ground
it was a good thing to have tried.
And I still have the letters, of course.
Sometimes I will take a few years' worth
to reread in the garden,
with a glass of iced tea.

And I feel, sometimes, part of something
very great, wholly profound and

I loved once, I loved twice,
easily three times I loved.”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“How deeply fortunate my life, my every prayer heard by the angels.

I asked for the earth; I received earth, like so much
mud in the face.

I prayed for relief from suffering: I received suffering.
Who can say my prayers were not heard? They were

translated, edited-and if certain
of the important words were left out or misunderstood, a crucial

article deleted, still they were taken in, studied like ancient texts.”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“I knew what they were a bribe, a distraction.
Like the excitement of school: the truth was time was moving in one direction, like a wave lifting the whole house, the whole village.”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“With what do you fill an empty life?
Amorous figures, the self
in a dream, the self
replicated in another self, the two
stacked together, though the arms and legs
are always perfectly shaded
as in an urn or bas relief.

Inside, ashes of the actual life.
Ashes, disappointment-
And all he asks
is to complete his work,
to be suspended in time like
an orange slice in an ice cube-”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“But tonight we sit in the garden in our canvas chairs
so late into the evening-
why should we look either forward or backward?

Why should we be forced to remember:
it is in our blood, this knowledge.
Shortness of the days; darkness, coldness of winter.
It is in our blood and bones; it is in our history.
It takes genius to forget these things.”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“All different, except of course
the wish to go back. Inevitably
last or first, repeated
over and over-

So the echo lingered. And the wish
held us and tormented us
though we knew in our own bodies
it was never granted.

We knew, and on dark nights, we acknowledged this.
How sweet the night became then,
once the wish released us,
how utterly silent.”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“The wheat gathered and stored, the last
fruit dried: time

that is hoarded, that is never used,
does it also end?”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“Meaning, it will feed you, it will ravish you
it will not keep you alive.”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable

“What do we have to appease the great forces?”
― Louise Glück, The Seven Ages: Bold and Masterful Poems on Death, Metamorphosis, and Embracing the Inevitable