Louise Gluck Quotes & Sayings

Panic is a synonym for being; in its delays, in its swerving and rushing syntax, its frantic lists and questions, it fends off time and loss. Its opposite is oblivion: not the tranquil oblivion of sleep but the threatening oblivions of sex and death. — Louise Gluck

Honor the words that enter and attach to your brain. — Louise Gluck

The love of form is a love of endings. — Louise Gluck

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 Gluck

The powerful are always lied to since the weak are always driven to panic — Louise Gluck

Dear friend,
dear trembling partner, what
surprises you most in what you feel,
earth's radiance or your own delight?
For me, always
the delight is the surprise. — Louise Gluck

They sat far apart
deliberately, to experience, daily,
the sweetness of seeing each other across
great distance. — Louise Gluck

The books [poetry collections] may not sell, but neither are they given away or thrown away. They tend, more than other books, to fall apart in their owners' hands. Not I suppose good news in a culture and economy built on obsolescence. But for a book to be loved this way and turned to this way for consolation and intense renewable excitement seems to me a marvel. — Louise Gluck

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. — Louise Gluck

Horse

What does the horse give you
That I cannot give you?

I watch you when you are alone,
When you ride into the field behind the dairy,
Your hands buried in the mare's
Dark mane.

Then I know what lies behind your silence:
Scorn, hatred of me, of marriage. Still,
You want me to touch you; you cry out
As brides cry, but when I look at you I see
There are no children in your body.
Then what is there?

Nothing, I think. Only haste
To die before I die.

In a dream, I watched you ride the horse
Over the dry fields and then
Dismount: you two walked together;
In the dark, you had no shadows.
But I felt them coming toward me
Since at night they go anywhere,
They are their own masters.

Look at me. You think I don't understand?
What is the animal
If not passage out of this life? — Louise Gluck

I thought my life was over and my heart was broken.

Then I moved to Cambridge. — Louise Gluck

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. — Louise Gluck

It is very difficult to win. It's not in my script. — Louise Gluck

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 Gluck

Tell me this is the future,
I won't believe you.
Tell me I'm living,
I won't believe you. — Louise Gluck

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 Gluck

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 Gluck

It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing, a restlessness sometimes, but not inevitably, played out romantically, or sexually. Always there seems something ahead, the next poem or story, visible, at least, apprehensible, but unreachable. To perceive it at all is to be haunted by it; some sound, some tone, becomes a torment - the poem embodying that sound seems to exist somewhere already finished. It's like a lighthouse, except that, as one swims towards it, it backs away. — Louise Gluck

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 Gluck

What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word's setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word's full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise. — Louise Gluck

The air had become heavy, not because it had greater substance, but because there was nothing left to breathe. — Louise Gluck

Tonight I saw myself in the dark window as
the image of my father, whose life
was spent like this,
thinking of death, to the exclusion
of other sensual matters,
so in the end that life
was easy to give up, since
it contained nothing: even
my mother's voice couldn't make him
change or turn back
as he believed
that once you can't love another human being
you have no place in the world. — Louise Gluck

Whatever/ returns from oblivion/ returns to find a voice. — Louise Gluck

Why do I not forget? — Louise Gluck

I had nothing and I was still changed. Like a costume, my numbness was taken away. Then hunger was added. — Louise Gluck

We have a disturbing cultural appetite for novelty, and it seems to me wrong each new laureate should dislodge the ideas of his or her predecessor, especially when they're still unfolding. — Louise Gluck

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. — Louise Gluck

Intense love always leads to mourning. — Louise Gluck

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. — Louise Gluck

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 Gluck

Siken occasionally locates a poem in loss as enacted, not implicit, event. These are among his most beautiful poems, their capitulations heartbreaking in the context of prolonged animal struggle against acknowledgement. — Louise Gluck

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 Gluck

Why love what you will lose?
There is nothing else to love. — Louise Gluck

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. — Louise Gluck

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 — Louise Gluck

I don't live with earplugs. I don't like the spotlight - but I like overhearing conversations. — Louise Gluck

I pretended indifference ... even in the presence of love, in the presence of hunger. And the more deeply I felt, the less able I was to respond. — Louise Gluck

End of Winter"

Over the still world, a bird calls
waking solitary among black boughs.

You wanted to be born; I let you be born.
When has my grief ever gotten
in the way of your pleasure?

Plunging ahead
into the dark and light at the same time
eager for sensation

as though you were some new thing, wanting
to express yourselves

all brilliance, all vivacity
never thinking
this would cost you anything,
never imagining the sound of my voice
as anything but part of you -

you won't hear it in the other world,
not clearly again,
not in birdcall or human cry,

not the clear sound, only
persistent echoing
in all sound that means good-bye, good-bye -

the one continuous line
that binds us to each other. — Louise Gluck

Toward his critics, the artist harbors a defensive ace: knowledge that the future will erase the present. — Louise Gluck

Tell me, the poet says, the lie I need to feel safe, and tell me in your own voice, so I believe you. One more tale to stay alive. — Louise Gluck

The master said You must write what you see.
But what I see does not move me.
The master answered Change what you see. — Louise Gluck

He takes her in his arms
He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you
But he thinks
this is a lie, so he says in the end
You're dead, nothing can hurt you
which seems to him
a more promising beginning, more true. — Louise Gluck

The sound of the sea - just memory now. — Louise Gluck

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

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

As I saw it,
all my mother's life, my father
held her down, like
lead strapped to her ankles.
She was
buoyant by nature;
she wanted to travel,
go to the theater, go to museums.
What he wanted
was to lie on the couch
with the Times
over his face,
so that death, when it came,
wouldn't seem a significant change. — Louise Gluck

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

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 ... — Louise Gluck

Marathon

2. Song of the River

Once we were happy, we had no memories.
For all the repetition, nothing happened twice.
We were always walking parallel to a river
with no sense of progression
though the trees across from us
were sometimes birch, sometimes cypress-
the sky was blue, a matrix of blue glass.

While, in the river, things were going by-
a few leaves, a child's boat painted red and white,
its sail stained by the water-

As they passed, on the surface we could see ourselves;
we seemed to drift
apart and together, as the river
linked us forever, though up ahead
were other couples, choosing souvenirs. — Louise Gluck

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 Gluck

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 Gluck

I'm like the child who buries
her head in the pillow
so as not to see, the child who tells herself
that light causes sadness - — Louise Gluck

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 Gluck

The unsaid, for me, exerts great power... — Louise Gluck

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

The Triumph Of Achilles

In the story of Patroclus
no one survives, not even Achilles
who was nearly a god.
Patroclus resembled him; they wore
the same armor.

Always in these friendships
one serves the other, one is less than the other:
the hierarchy
is always apparent, though the legends
cannot be trusted--
their source is the survivor,
the one who has been abandoned.

What were the Greek ships on fire
compared to this loss?

In his tent, Achilles
grieved with his whole being
and the gods saw
he was a man already dead, a victim
of the part that loved,
the part that was mortal. — Louise Gluck

Without thinking, I knelt in the grass, like someone meaning to pray.
When I tried to stand again, I couldn't move,
my legs were utterly rigid. Does grief change you like that?
Through the birches, I could see the pond.
The sun was cutting small white holes in the water.
I got up finally; I walked down to the pond.
I stood there, brushing the grass from my skirt, watching myself,
like a girl after her first lover
turning slowly at the bathroom mirror, naked, looking for a sign.
But nakedness in women is always a pose.
I was not transfigured. I would never be free. — Louise Gluck

Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you've no longer been bested by these events. — Louise Gluck

crying yes risk joy — Louise Gluck

Gretel in Darkness:


This is the world we wanted.
All who would have seen us dead
are dead. I hear the witch's cry
break in the moonlight through a sheet
of sugar: God rewards.
Her tongue shrivels into gas....

Now, far from women's arms
And memory of women, in our father's hut
we sleep, are never hungry.
Why do I not forget?
My father bars the door, bars harm
from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,
summer afternoons you look at me as though
you meant to leave,
as though it never happened.
But I killed for you. I see armed firs,
the spires of that gleaming kiln--

Nights I turn to you to hold me
but you are not there.
Am I alone? Spies
hiss in the stillness, Hansel
we are there still, and it is real, real,
that black forest, and the fire in earnest. — Louise Gluck

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 Gluck

At the end of my suffering/there was a door. — Louise Gluck

Liberation

My mind is clouded,
I cannot hunt anymore.
I lay my gun over the tracks of the rabbit.

It was as though I became that creature
who could not decide
whether to flee or be still
and so was trapped in the pursuer's eyes-

And for the first time I knew
those eyes have to be blank
because it is impossible
to kill and question at the same time.

Then the shutter snapped,
the rabbit went free. He flew
through the empty forest

that part of me
that was the victim.
Only victims have a destiny.

And the hunter, who believed
whatever struggles
begs to be torn apart:

that part is paralyzed. — Louise Gluck

It seems to me in the past it's been a good thing, as a writer, to have experiences I hadn't expected. — Louise Gluck

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

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 Gluck

How can I know you love me
unless I see you grieve over me? — Louise Gluck

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 Gluck

I have no concern with widening audience. — Louise Gluck

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 Gluck

Even before you touched me, I belonged to you; all you had to do was look at me. — Louise Gluck

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 Gluck

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 Gluck

We live in a period of great polarities: in art, in public policy, in morality. In poetry, art seems, at one extreme, rhymed good manners, and at the other, chaos. — Louise Gluck

Birth, not death, is the hard loss. — Louise Gluck

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. — Louise Gluck

I preferred the simplest vocabulary. — Louise Gluck

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 Gluck

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

Sounds weren't coming out of my mouth. And yet they were in my head, expressed, possibly, as something less exact, thought perhaps, though at the time they still seemed like sounds to me. — Louise Gluck

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

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 Gluck

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

At first I saw you everywhere. Now only in certain things, at longer intervals. — Louise Gluck

She can't remember herself as that person
but she keeps thinking the pool will remember
and explain to her the meaning of her prayer
so she can understand
whether it was answered or not. — Louise Gluck

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 Gluck

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

You saved me, you should remember me. — Louise Gluck

Lived to see you throwing
Me aside. That fought
like netted fish inside me. Saw you throbbing
In my syrups. Saw you sleep. And lived to see
That all flushed down
The refuse. Done?
It lives in me.
You live in me. Malignant.
Love, you ever want me, don't. — Louise Gluck

And then, suddenly, something is over. — Louise Gluck

You're not a creature in body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity. — Louise Gluck

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 Gluck

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. — Louise Gluck

(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 Gluck