Faithful and Virtuous Night Quotes

“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 Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

“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 Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

“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 Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

“Silence had entered me.
It was like the night, and my memories - they were like stars
in that they were fixed, though of course
if one would see they are unending fires, like the fires of hell.”
― Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

“THEORY OF MEMORY 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 Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

“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 Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

“The air had become heavy, not because it had greater substance, but because there was nothing left to breathe.”
― Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

“(after many years) we were still at that first stage, still
preparing to begin a journey, but we were changed nevertheless;
we could see this in one another; we had changed although
we never moved, and one said, ah, behold how we have aged, traveling
from day to night only, neither forward nor sideward, and this seemed
in a strange way miraculous. And those who believed we should have a purpose
believed this was the purpose, and those who felt we must remain free
in order to encounter truth felt it had been revealed.”
― Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

“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 Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

“You have no idea how shocking it is to a child when something continuous stops.”
― Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

“We must let him sleep, said the grandmother. We must walk quietly by. He is at that point in life at which neither returning to the beginning nor advancing to the end seems bearable; therefore, he has decided to stop, here, in the midst of things, though this makes him an obstacle to others, such as ourselves. But we must not give up hope; in my own life, she continued, there was such a time, though that was long ago.”
― Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

“I write about you all the time, I said aloud. Every time I say "I", it refers to you.”
― Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

“Silence had entered me.
It was like the night, and my memories-they were like stars
in that they were fixed, though of course
if one could see as do the astronomers
one would see they are unending fires, like the fires of hell.”
― Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

“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 Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

“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 Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

“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 Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

“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 Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

“I sympathize. Those to whom I am bound by affection will forgive, I hope, the distortions compelled by the occasion. I will be brief. This concludes, as the stewardess says, our short flight.”
― Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

“Darkness overswept the land and on the sea the night floated strapped to a slab of wood”
― Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

“Day alternated with night, the earth and sky taking turns being illuminated.”
― Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night

“When you hear this again, she said, perhaps the words will be less intimidating, if you remember how you first heard them, in the voice of a little girl.”
― Louise Glück, Faithful and Virtuous Night