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Louise Glück

Louise Glück Quotes

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Famous Louise Glück Quotes

“Matins You want to know how I spend my time? I walk the front lawn, pretending to be weeding. You ought to know I'm never weeding, on my knees, pulling clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact I'm looking for courage, for some evidence my life will change, though it takes forever, checking each clump for the symbolic leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already the leaves turning, always the sick trees going first, the dying turning brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform their curfew of music. You want to see my hands? As empty now as at the first note. Or was the point always to continue without a sign?”

“Time passed, turning everything to ice. Under the ice, the future stirred. If you fell into it, you died. It was a time of waiting, of suspended action. I lived in the present, which was that part of the future you could see. The past floated above my head, like the sun and moon, visible but never reachable. It was a time governed by contradictions, as in I felt nothing and I was afraid.”

“The concierge, I realized, had been standing beside me. Do not be sad, he said. You have begun your own journey, not into the world, like your friend’s, but into yourself and your memories. As they fall away, perhaps you will attain that enviable emptiness into which all things flow, like the empty cup in the Daodejing— Everything is change, he said, and everything is connected. Also everything returns, but what returns is not what went away—”