Quotes By Author: Louise Glück

“It is true that there is not enough beauty in the world. It is also true that I am not competent to restore it. Neither is there candor, and here I may be of some use.”

“I think here I will leave you. It has come to seemthere is no perfect ending.Indeed, there are infinite endings.Or perhaps, once one begins,there are only endings.”

“I don’t need your praiseto survive. I was here first, before you were here, beforeyou ever planted a garden.And I’ll be here when only the sun and moonare left, and the sea, and the wide field.I will constitute the field.”

“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?”

“Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond—surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjectsto which my predecessors apprenticed themselves.I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.”

“Why love what you will lose?There is nothing else to love.”

“The master said You must write what you see.But what I see does not move me.The master answered Change what you see.”

“I was not prepared: sunset, end of summer. Demonstrations of time as a continuum, as something coming to an end, not a suspension: the senses wouldn’t protect me. 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.”

“Remember that time you made the wish? I make a lot of wishes.The time I lied to youabout the butterfly. I always wonderedwhat you wished for. What do you think I wished for?I don’t know. That I’d come back,that we’d somehow be together in the end. I wished for what I always wish for. I wished for another poem.”

“(after many years) we were still at that first stage, stillpreparing to begin a journey, but we were changed nevertheless;we could see this in one another; we had changed althoughwe never moved, and one said, ah, behold how we have aged, travelingfrom day to night only, neither forward nor sideward, and this seemedin a strange way miraculous. And those who believed we should have a purposebelieved this was the purpose, and those who felt we must remain freein order to encounter truth felt it had been revealed.”