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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.

Louise Glück

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Louise Glück
Heart
Conventions
Almonds
Surely
Inexhaustible
Loneliness
Disguised
Subjects
Flowering
Wind
Predecessors
Hear
Echo
Desire
Convention
Great
Echoes
Almond

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