Winter Recipes from the Collective Quotes

“The concierge, I realized, had been standing beside me.
Do not be sad, he said. You have begun your own journey,
not into the world, like your friend’s, but into yourself and your memories.
As they fall away, perhaps you will attain
that enviable emptiness into which
all things flow, like the empty cup in the Daodejing—

Everything is change, he said, and everything is connected.
Also everything returns, but what returns is not
what went away—”
― Louise Glück, Winter Recipes from the Collective

“How heavy my mind is,
filled with the past.
Is there enough room
for the world to penetrate?
It must go somewhere,
it cannot simply sit on the surface--

Stars gleaming over the water.
The leaves piled, waiting to be lit.

Insight, my sister said.
Now it is here.
But hard to see in the darkness.

You must find your footing
before you put your weight on it.”
― Louise Gluck, Winter Recipes from the Collective

“I see, he said, that you no longer
wish to resume your former life,
to move, that is, in a straight line as time
suggests we do, but rather (here he gestured toward the lake)
in a circle which aspires to
the stillness at the heart of things,
though I prefer to think it also resembles a clock.”
― Louise Gluck, Winter Recipes from the Collective

“If you can't read, my sister said,
can you be happy?”
― Louise Glück, Winter Recipes from the Collective

“Look at us, she said. We are all of us in this room
still waiting to be transformed. This is why we search for love.
We search for it all of our lives,
even after we find it.”
― Louise Glück, Winter Recipes from the Collective

“Look at us, she said. We are all of us in this room
still waiting to be transformed. This is why we search for love.”
― Louise Gluck, Winter Recipes from the Collective

“Insight, my sister said.
Now it is here.
But hard to see in the darkness.

You must find your footing
before you put your weight on it.”
― Louise Glück, Winter Recipes from the Collective

“A sickness came over me
whose origins were never determined
thought it became more and more difficult
to sustain the pretense of normalcy,
of good health or joy in existence-”
― Louise Glück, Winter Recipes from the Collective

“We watched you walk away. Down the stone steps
and into the little town. I felt
something true had been spoken
and though I would have preferred to have spoken it myself
I was glad at least to have heard it.”
― Louise Gluck, Winter Recipes from the Collective

“Everything is change, he said, and everything is connected. Also everything returns, but what returns is not what went away.”
― Louise Glück, Winter Recipes from the Collective

“Outside the car, the cows and pastures are drifting away;
they look calm, but calm is not the truth.
Despair is the truth. This is what
mother and father know. All hope is lost.
We must return to where it was lost
if we want to find it again.”
― Louise Glück, Winter Recipes from the Collective

“there is no such thing as death in miniature”
― Louise Glück, Winter Recipes from the Collective

“The part of life
devoted to contemplation
was at odds with the part
committed to action.”
― Louise Glück, Winter Recipes from the Collective

“Everything is change”
― Louise Glück, Winter Recipes from the Collective: Poems

“Look at us, she said. We are all of us in this room still waiting to be transformed. This is why we search for love. We search for it all of our lives, even after we find it.”
― Louise Glück, Winter Recipes from the Collective

“The beautiful golden days when you were soon to be dying
but could still enter into random conversations with strangers,
random but also deliberate, so impressions of the world
were still forming and changing you,
and the city was at its most radiant, uncrowded in summer
though by then everything was happening more slowly--”
― Louise Glück, Winter Recipes from the Collective

“I have
never been much good with living things.
Brightness and darkness I do rather well with.”
― Louise Glück, Winter Recipes from the Collective

“Obviously my mind is not what it was, she said.
Most of my facts have disappeared, but certain
underlying principles have been in consequence
exposed with surprising clarity.”
― Louise Glück, Winter Recipes from the Collective

“If you can't read, my sister said,
can you be happy?”
― Louise Glück, Winter Recipes from the Collective

“Life, my sister said,
is like a torch passed now
from the body to the mind.
Sadly, she went on, the mind is not
there to receive it.”
― Louise Glück, Winter Recipes from the Collective