Averno Quotes

“You get on a train, you disappear.

You write your name on the window, you disappear.

There are places like this everywhere,
places you enter as a young girl
from which you never return.”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“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 Glück, Averno

“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

“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 Glück, Averno

“death cannot harm me
more than you have harmed me,
my beloved life.”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“Come to me said the world. I was standing
in my wool coat at a kind of bright portal—
I can finally say
long ago; it gives me considerable pleasure. Beauty
the healer, the teacher—

death cannot harm me
more than you have harmed me,
my beloved life.”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“It is true that there is not enough beauty in the world.
It is also true that I am not competent to restore it.
Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“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 Glück, Averno

“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 Glück, Averno

“The sound of the sea— just memory now.”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“They say
there is a rift in the human soul
which was not constructed to belong
entirely to life.”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“What others found in art,
I found in nature. What others found
in human love, I found in nature.”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“Dear bad animal
Dear caged thing
There was something about you.”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“Summer after summer has ended,
balm after violence:
it does me no good to be good to me now;
violence has changed me.”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“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 Glück, Averno

“Persephone is having sex in hell.
Unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t know
what winter is, only that
she is what causes it.”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“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 Glück, Averno

“We don't expect to know
what Persephone is doing.
She is dead, the dead are mysteries.”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“This silence is my companion now.
I ask: of what did my soul die?
and the silence answers

if your soul died, whose life
are you living and
when did you become that person?”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“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 Glück, Averno

“You die when your spirit dies.
Otherwise, you live.
You may not do a good job of it, but you go on--
something you have no choice about.”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“Time passed, turning everything to ice.
Under the ice, the future stirred.
If you fell into it, you died.

It was a time
of waiting, of suspended action.

I lived in the present, which was
that part of the future you could see.
The past floated above my head,
like the sun and moon, visible but never reachable.

It was a time
governed by contradictions, as in
I felt nothing and
I was afraid.”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“What will you do,
when it is your turn in the field with the god?”
― Louise Glück , Averno

“It is terrible to be alone.
I don't mean to live alone---
to be alone, where no one hears you.”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“The songs have changed, but really they are still quite beautiful.
They have been concentrated in a smaller space, the space of the mind.
They are dark, now, with desolation and anguish.

And yet the notes recur. They hover oddly
in anticipation of silence.
The ear gets used to them.
The eye gets used to disappearances.

You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared.”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“If your soul died, whose life are you living, and when did you become that person?”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“The room was quiet.
That is, the room was quiet, but the lovers were breathing.
...
And in the dark room, the lovers sleeping in each other’s arms.
We are, each of us, the one who wakens first,
who stirs first and sees, there in the first dawn,
the stranger.”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“Song of the earth,
song of the mythic vision of eternal life -
My soul
shattered with the strain
if trying to belong to earth -
What will you do,
when it is your turn in the field with the god?”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“Summer after summer has ended,
balm after violence:
it does me no good
to be good to me now;
violence has changed me.”
― Louise Glück, Averno

“My memory is like a basement filled with old papers:
nothing ever changes.”
― Louise Glück, Averno