Louise Glück Quotes

Intense love always leads to mourning.

I sleep so you will be alive,
it is that simple.

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

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.

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 —

"I write about you all the time, I said aloud. Every time I say "I", it refers to you."

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

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.

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.

I'm tired of you, chaos
of the living world —

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

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.

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

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 —

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.