Louise Glück Quotes

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

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

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.

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?

I don’t need your praise
to survive. I was here first,
before you were here, before
you ever planted a garden.
And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon
are left, and the sea, and the wide field.

I will constitute the field.

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.

Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you've no longer been bested by these events.

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

Come to me said the world. I was standing
in my wool coat at a kind of bright portal -
I can finally say
long ago; it gives me considerable pleasure. Beauty
the healer, the teacher -

death cannot harm me
more than you have harmed me,
my beloved life.

Once I could imagine my soul
I could imagine my death.
When I imagined my death
my soul died. This
I remember clearly.

My body persisted.
Not thrived, but persisted.
Why I do not know.