Louise Gluck quotes:

Intense love always leads to mourning.

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.

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

the powerful are always lied to since the weak are always driven to panic

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

So you couldn't protect yourself? The absolute erodes; the boundary, the wall around the self erodes. If I was waiting I had been invaded by time. But do you think you're free? I think I recognize the patterns of my nature. Bud do you think you're free? I had nothing and I was still changed. Like a costume, my numbness was taken away. Then hunger was added.

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

Lived to see you throwingMe aside. That foughtlike netted fish inside me. Saw you throbbingIn my syrups. Saw you sleep. And lived to seeThat all flushed downThe refuse. Done?It lives in me.You live in me. Malignant.Love, you ever want me, don't."

As I saw it, all my mother's life, my father held her down, like lead strapped to her ankles.She wasbuoyant by nature;she wanted to travel,go to the theater, go to museums.What he wantedwas to lie on the couchwith the Timesover his face,so that death, when it came,wouldn't seem a significant change.

You know, he said, our work is difficult: we confrontmuch sorrow and disappointment.He gazed at me with increasing frankness.I was like you once, he added, in love with turbulence.

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.