Quotes by
Louise Glück |
1943- , American poet, Nobel 2020
She has won numerous major literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, National Humanities Medal, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Bollingen Prize. From 2003 to 2004, she was Poet Laureate of the United States. In 2020, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
| 22 quotes | 1,186 visits |
Quotations
| • | The master said You must write what you see. But what I see does not move me. The master answered Change what you see. 4 |
| • | At the end of my suffering there was a door. 4 |
| • | To raise the veil. To see what you're saying goodbye to. 3 |
| • | The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last. |
| • | The poem will not survive on content but through voice. By voice I mean the style of thought, for which a style of speech never convincingly substitutes. |
| • | Intense love always leads to mourning. |
| • | The love of form is a love of endings. |
| • | 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. |
| • | Honor the words that enter and attach to your brain. |
Quotes in Verse
| • | At first I saw you everywhere. Now only in certain things, at longer intervals. 6 |
| • | Of two sisters one is always the watcher, one the dancer. 5 |
| • | We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory. 5 |
| • | The soul is silent. If it speaks at all it speaks in dreams. |
| • | Birth, not death, is the hard loss. |
| • | You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you. |
| • | That's why I'm not to be trusted. Because a wound to the heart is also a wound to the mind. |
| • | What was difficult was the travel, which, on arrival, is forgotten. |
| • | 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. |
| • | I think I can remember being dead. Many times, in winter, I approached Zeus. Tell me, I would ask him, how can I endure the earth? |
| • | From the beginning of time, in childhood, I thought that pain meant I was not loved. It meant I loved. |
| • | Even before you touched me, I belonged to you; all you had to do was look at me. |
| • | My memory is like a basement filled with old papers: nothing ever changes. |
