Louise Glück Quotes

28 Sourced Quotes

I sleep so you will be alive,
it is that simple.

Louise Glück
Solace of the night sky,
the hardly moving
face of the clock.

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

Louise Glück
We had the problem of age, the problem of wishing to linger.
Not needing, anymore, even to make a contribution.
Merely wishing to linger: to be, to be here.

Louise Glück
And you never say
Leave me
since the dead do not like being alone.

Louise Glück
Our parents merged into the one
totemic creature:
Come, she said. Come to Mother.

Louise Glück
We respect, here in America,
what is concrete, visible. We ask
What is it for? What does it lead to?

Louise Glück
You ask the sea, what can you promise me
and it speaks the truth; it says erasure.

Louise Glück
My first house shall be built on these sands,
My second in the sea.

Louise Glück
You know why you cook? Because
you like control. A person who cooks is a person who likes
to create debt.

Louise Glück
I have to tell you what I've learned, that I know now
what happens to the dreamers.
They don't feel it when they change. One day
they wake, they dress, they are old.

Louise Glück
Fish bones walked the waves off Hatteras And there were other signs That Death wooed us, by water, wooed us By land

Louise Glück
My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer
I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar,
like what I remember of love when I was young —.

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

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

Louise Glück
In the window, the moon is hanging over the earth,
meaningless but full of messages.
It's dead, it's always been dead,
but it pretends to be something else,
burning like a star, and convincingly, so that you feel sometimes
it could actually make something grow on earth.

Louise Glück
We don't have a dog.
We have a hostile cat.
I think Sam's
intelligent; he
resents being a pet.

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

Louise Glück
Mothers weep at their daughters' weddings,
everyone knows that, though
for whose youth one cannot say.

Louise Glück
There was a time
only certainty gave me
any joy. Imagine —
certainty, a dead thing.

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

Louise Glück
Seven years I watched the next-door
Lady stroll her empty mate.

Louise Glück
Nights I turn to you to hold me
but you are not there.

Louise Glück
Always nights I feel the ocean
Biting at my life.

Louise Glück
Then begins
the terrible charity of marriage,
husband and wife
climbing the green hill in gold light
until there is no hill,
only a flat plain stopped by the sky.

Louise Glück
You have only to wait, they will find you.
The geese flying low over the marsh,
glittering in black water.
They find you.

Louise Glück
To get born, your body makes a pact with death,
and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat —.

Louise Glück
The garden admires you.
For your sake it smears itself with green pigment,
the ecstatic reds of the roses,
so that you will come to it with your lovers.

Louise Glück