Louise Gluck Quotes

We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.

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

Intense love always leads to mourning.

The soul is silent. If it speaks at all it speaks in dreams.

To raise the veil. To see what you're saying goodbye to.

What was difficult was the travel, which, on arrival, is forgotten.

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

The unsaid, for me, exerts great power...

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.

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.

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?

Living things don't all require light in the same degree. Some of us make our own light: a silver leaf like a path no one can use, a shallow lake of silver in the darkness under the great maples. But you know this already. You and the others who think you live for truth and, by extension, love all that is cold.

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

I remember my childhood as a long wish to be elsewhere.

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.

It is true 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.

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.

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 look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory. from Nostos.

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.

At the end of my suffering there was door

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.

We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory

I am suspicious of my existing ideas, my conscious thoughts and convictions. They are what I need to get beyond, into ignorance and after that, with luck, discovery.

Vespers In your extended absence, you permit me use of earth, anticipating some return on investment. I must report failure in my assignment, principally regarding the tomato plants. I think I should not be encouraged to grow tomatoes. Or, if I am, you should withhold the heavy rains, the cold nights that come so often here, while other regions get twelve weeks of summer. All this belongs to you: on the other hand, I planted the seeds, 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, you may not know how much terror we bear, the spotted leaf, the red leaves of the maple falling even in August, in early darkness: I am responsible for these vines.

The Fear of Burial In the empty field, in the morning, the body waits to be claimed. The spirit sits beside it, on a small rock-- nothing comes to give it form again. Think of the body's loneliness. At night pacing the sheared field, its shadow buckled tightly around. Such a long journey. And already the remote, trembling lights of the village not pausing for it as they scan the rows. How far away they seem, the wooden doors, the bread and milk laid like weights on the table.

I’m going to suggest something radical here -- something that is much easier said than done. We must not separate our life from our art. Louise Gluck recently spoke of this in an interview with William Giraldi in Poets & Writers: 'You have to live your life if you’re going to do original work. Your work will come out of an authentic life, and if you suppress all of your most passionate impulses in the service of an art that has not yet declared itself, you’re making a terrible mistake. I’m often asked about motherhood and writing. About teaching and writing. About making a living and writing. Beneath all of the questions is a deeper question, thrumming: Can I have a life and be a writer? "I’d like to answer a resounding yes to that question, though with the caveat that this requires a daily practice, a daily awareness that perhaps we need not delineate between life and art, draw a line down the center of our days and put our work on one side and everything else on the other. Sarah Ruhl offers this: 'I found that life intruding on writing was, in fact, life. And that, tempting as it may be for a writer who is also a parent, one must not think of life as an intrusion. At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.

Witchgrass" Something comes into the world unwelcome calling disorder, disorder— If you hate me so much don’t bother to give me a name: do you need one more slur in your language, another way to blame one tribe for everything— as we both know, if you worship one god, you only need One enemy— I’m not the enemy. Only a ruse to ignore what you see happening right here in this bed, a little paradigm of failure. One of your precious flowers dies here almost every day and you can’t rest until you attack the cause, meaning whatever is left, whatever happens to be sturdier than your personal passion— It was not meant to last forever in the real world. But why admit that, when you can go on doing what you always do, mourning and laying blame, always the two together. I don’t need your praise to survive. I was here first, before you were here, before you ever planted a garden. And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon are left, and the sea, and the wide field. I will constitute the field.

Siren I became a criminal when I fell in love. Before that I was a waitress. I didn't want to go to Chicago with you. I wanted to marry you, I wanted Your wife to suffer. I wanted her life to be like a play In which all the parts are sad parts. Does a good person Think this way? I deserve Credit for my courage-- I sat in the dark on your front porch. Everything was clear to me: If your wife wouldn't let you go That proved she didn't love you. If she loved you Wouldn't she want you to be happy? I think now If I felt less I would be A better person. I was A good waitress. I could carry eight drinks. I used to tell you my dreams. Last night I saw a woman sitting in a dark bus-- In the dream, she's weeping, the bus she's on Is moving away. With one hand She's waving; the other strokes An egg carton full of babies. The dream doesn't rescue the maiden.

I remember my childhood as a long wish to be elsewhere

in my dream, i built a funeral pyre. for myself, you understand. i thought i had suffered enough. i thought this was the end of my body: fire seemed the right end for hunger; they were the same  thing. and yet you didn’t die? it was a dream; i thought i was going home.

When I was a child looking at my parents' lives, you know what I thought? I thought heartbreaking. Now I think heartbreaking, but also insane. Also very funny. - Louis Gluck, Telemachus' Detachment

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

Aun antes de que me tocaras, era tuya; sólo tenías que mirarme.

Your body will age, you will continue to need. You will want the earth, than 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.