Louise Glück Quotes

Why do I not forget?

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.

We don't expect to know
what Persephone is doing.
She is dead, the dead are mysteries.

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

Poetry survives because it haunts and it haunts because it is simultaneously utterly clear and deeply mysterious; because it cannot be entirely accounted for, it cannot be exhausted.

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.

(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.

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.

You saved me, you should remember me.

Don’t prejudge your stimuli. Just trust where your attention goes.

I expected better of two creatures
who were given minds: if not
that you would actually care for each other
at least that you would understand
grief is distributed
between you, among all your kind

(You said once that the life of a poet oscillates between ecstasy and agony, and what mitigates those extremes is the necessary daily business of living.) Yes. Friends, conversation, gardens. Daily life. It’s what we have. I believe in the world. I trust it to provide me.

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.

Summer after summer has ended,
balm after violence:
it does me no good to be good to me now;
violence has changed me.

Dear bad animal
Dear caged thing
There was something about you.