Louise Glück

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

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

"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; for example, to the power of ruins, to works of art either damaged or incomplete. Such works inevitably allude to larger contexts; they haunt because they are not whole, though wholeness is implied: another time, a world in which they were whole, or were to have been whole, is implied. There is no moment in which their first home is felt to be the museum."

"Father has his arm around Tereze. She squints. My thumb is in my mouth: my fifth autumn. Near the copper beech the spaniel dozes in shadows. Not one of us does not avert his eyes."

"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."

"One of the purest and most accomplished lyric poets now writing."

"Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting. Then nothing. The weak sun flickered over the dry surface.It is terrible to survive as consciousness buried in the dark earth."

"I caution you as I was never cautioned you will never let go, you will never be satiated."

"Intense love always leads to mourning."

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

"I did not expect to survive, earth suppressing me. I didnt expect to waken again, to feel in damp earth my body able to respond again, remembering after so long how to open again in the cold light of earliest spring—afraid, yes, but among you again crying yes risk joyin the raw wind of the new world."

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