Louise GluМ€ck Quotes

The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last.

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.

From the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved.

The love of form is a love of endings.

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.

The unsaid, for me, exerts great power.

The soul is silent. If it speaks at all it speaks in dreams.

What was difficult was the travel, which, on arrival, is forgotten.

Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer.

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—

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.

To raise the veil. To see what you’re saying goodbye to.

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

That’s why I’m not to be trusted.
Because a wound to the heart is also a wound to the mind

Intense love always leads to mourning.

Birth, not death, is the hard loss.