Quote

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

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Louise Glück
Humans
Ordinary
Dearer
Well
Joy
Balm
Existence
Imperial
Death
Closeness
Given
Dreamed
Night
Summer
Wells
Sorrow
Human
Lived

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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.
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I had nothing and I was still changed. Like a costume, my numbness was taken away. Then hunger was added.
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At first I saw you everywhere. Now only in certain things, at longer intervals.
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Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer.
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The unsaid, for me, exerts great power.
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To raise the veil. To see what you're saying goodbye to.
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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—
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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
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The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The soul is silent. If it speaks at all it speaks in dreams.
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At the end of my suffering/there was a door.
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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.
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We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.
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What was difficult was the travel, which, on arrival, is forgotten.
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The love of form is a love of endings.
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Intense love always leads to mourning.
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