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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

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

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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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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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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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Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer.
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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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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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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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What was difficult was the travel, which, on arrival, is forgotten.
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At first I saw you everywhere. Now only in certain things, at longer intervals.
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We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.
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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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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 the end of my suffering/there was a door.
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The unsaid, for me, exerts great power.
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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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The soul is silent. If it speaks at all it speaks in dreams.
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