Quotes from Louise Gluck

I preferred the simplest vocabulary.

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

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

The unsaid, for me, exerts great power.

The great thing is not having a mind. Feelings: oh, I have those; they govern me.

Honor the words that enter and attach to your brain.

I have no concern with widening audience.

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

What I responded to, on the page, was the way a poem could liberate, by means of a word's setting, through subtleties of timing, of pacing, that word's full and surprising range of meaning. It seemed to me that simple language best suited this enterprise.

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.

Intense love always leads to mourning.

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

It seems to me in the past it's been a good thing, as a writer, to have experiences I hadn't expected.

Toward his critics, the artist harbors a defensive ace: knowledge that the future will erase the present.

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

We have a disturbing cultural appetite for novelty, and it seems to me wrong each new laureate should dislodge the ideas of his or her predecessor, especially when they're still unfolding.

The love of form is a love of endings.

I don't live with earplugs. I don't like the spotlight - but I like overhearing conversations.

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?

Birth, not death, is the hard loss.

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