Louise Glück Quotes

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Earth Heart Hunger Mothers

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

Louise Glück

Memories, Childhood, Looks

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

Louise Glück

Dream, Soul, Speak

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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 Glück

Letting Go, Sublime, Age

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I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen.

Louise Glück

Vocabulary, Silence, Wish

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That's why I'm not to be trusted.
Because a wound to the heart is also a wound to the mind

Louise Glück

Heart, Mind, Trusted

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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 Glück

Art, Swim, Desire

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The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last.

Louise Glück

May, Lasts, Life Is

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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 Glück

Able, Indifference, Hunger

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The unsaid, for me, exerts great power.

Louise Glück

Writing, Unsaid, Great Power

"Disruption, Hesitation, Silence". Article by Louise Glück, The American Poetry Review, Volume 22, No. 5, pp. 30-32, www.jstor.org. September-October 1993.

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Intense love always leads to mourning.

Louise Glück

Mourning, Intense, Intense Love

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

Louise Glück

Saws, Firsts, Certain

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

Louise Glück

Pain, Childhood

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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 Glück

Brother, Heart, Fire

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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 Glück

Mother, Giving Up, Father

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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 Glück

Moving, Writing, Doe

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Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer.

Louise Glück

Sister, Two, Dancer

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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 Glück

Mother, Children, Tired

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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 Glück

Children, Sadness, Light

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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 Glück

Girl, Grief, Moving

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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 Glück

Hurt, Lying, Love You

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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 Glück

Winter, Thinking, Earth

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

Louise Glück

Taken, Numbness, Costumes

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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 Glück

Summer, Night, Joy

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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 Glück

Mother, Lying, Father

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Birth, not death, is the hard loss.

Louise Glück

Loss, Birth, Hard

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Louise Glück

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Born: April 22, 1943
Occupation: Poet
Cite this Page: Citation

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