Louise Glück Quotes

You stand as rocks stand
to which the sea reaches
in transparent waves of longing;
they are marred, finally;
everything fixed is marred.
And the sea triumphs,
like all that is false,
all that is fluent and womanly.

Some of us make our own light: a silver leaf like a path no one can use.

The Mountain

My students look at me expectantly.
I explain to them that the life of art is a life
of endless labor. Their expressions
hardly change; they need to know
a little more about endless labor.
So I tell them the story of Sisyphus,
how he was doomed to push
a rock up a mountain, knowing nothing
would come of this effort
but that he would repeat it
indefinitely. I tell them
there is joy in this, in the artist’s life,
that one eludes
judgment, and as I speak
I am secretly pushing a rock myself,
slyly pushing it up the steep
face of a mountain. Why do I lie
to these children? They aren’t listening,
they aren’t deceived, their fingers
tapping at the wooden desks — So I retract
the myth; I tell them it occurs
in hell, and that the artist lies
because he is obsessed with attainment,
that he perceives the summit
as that place where he will live forever,
a place about to be
transformed by his burden: with every breath,
I am standing at the top of the mountain.
Both my hands are free. And the rock has added
height to the mountain.

To say I’m without fear–
it wouldn’t be true.
I’m afraid of sickness, humiliation.
Like anyone, I have my dreams.
But I’ve learned to hide them,
to protect myself
from fulfillment: all happiness
attracts the Fates’ anger.
They are sisters, savages–
in the end, they have
no emotion but envy. — 'Confession

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.

جُرحتُ، منذ زمن بعيد.
وعشتُ لكي أثأر لنفسي
من والدي، ليس
بسبب ما كان عليه،
بل بسبب ما أنا عليه: منذ بدء الزمن
أيّام الطفولة، فكّرتُ
أنّ الألم يعني
أنني لم أكن محبوبة،
أنني كنتُ أحبّ.

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.

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

Because you were foolish enough to love one place,
now you are homeless, an orphan
in succession of shelters.

You have no idea how shocking it is to a child when something continuous stops.

You saved me, you should remember me.

The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats.
Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms.

When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling.

I remember sounds like that from my childhood,
laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful,
something like that.

Lugano. Tables under the apple trees.
Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags.
And by the lake’s edge, a young man throws his hat into the water;
perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him.

Crucial
sounds or gestures like
a track laid down before the larger themes

and then unused, buried.

Islands in the distance. My mother
holding out a plate of little cakes — as far as I remember, changed
in no detail, the moment
vivid, intact, having never been
exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age
hungry for life, utterly confident — By the tables, patches of new grass, the pale green
pieced into the dark existing ground.

Surely spring has been returned to me, this time
not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet
it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly.

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.

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 could see as do the astronomers
one would see they are unending fires, like the fires of hell.

I could live almost completely in imagination.

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.