The Seven Ages
Louise Glück
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I was not prepared: sunset, end of summer. Demonstrations of time as a continuum, as something coming to an end, not a suspension: the senses wouldn’t protect me. I caution you as I was never cautioned: you will never let go, you will never be satiated. You will be damaged and scarred, you will continue to hunger. Your body will age, you will continue to need. You will want the earth, then more of the earth– Sublime, indifferent, it is present, it will not respond. It is encompassing, it will not minister. Meaning, it will feed you, it will ravish you, it will not keep you alive.”
“I was a winged obsessive, my moonlit feathers were paper. I lived hardly at all among men and women; I spoke only to angels. How fortunate my days, how charged and meaningful the nights’ continuous silence and opacity.—
“You were a beast at the edge of its cave, only waking and sleeping. Then the minute shift; the eye taken by something. Spring: the unforeseen flooding the abyss. And the life filling again. And finally a place found for everything.”
“With what do you fill an empty life? Amorous figures, the self in a dream, the self replicated in another self, the two stacked together, though the arms and legs are always perfectly shaded as in an urn or bas relief. Inside, ashes of the actual life. Ashes, disappointment- And all he asks is to complete his work, to be suspended in time like an orange slice in an ice cube-”
“What do we have to appease the great forces?”
“We were supposed to be, all of us, a circle, a line at every point equally weighted or tensed, equally close to the center. I saw it differently. In my mind, my parents were the circle; my sister and I were trapped inside.”
“Was it the sea? Responding, maybe, to celestial force? To be safe, I prayed. I tried to be a better person. Soon it seemed to me that what began as terror and matured into moral narcissism might have become in fact actual human growth. Maybe this is what my friends meant, taking my hand, telling me they understood the abuse, the incredible shit I accepted, implying (so I once thought) I was a little sick to give so much for so little. Whereas they meant I was good (clasping my hand intensely) a good friend and person, not a creature of pathos.”
“The wheat gathered and stored, the last fruit dried: time that is hoarded, that is never used, does it also end?”
“The curtains parted. Light coming in. Moonlight, then sunlight. Not changing because time was passing but because the one moment had many aspects.”
“The birthday was over. I was thinking, naturally, about time. I remember how, in almost the same instant, my heart would leap up exultant and collapse in desolate anguish. The leaping up -the half I didn't count- that was happiness; that is what the word meant.”
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Book Keywords:
nature, light, moments, poems, poetry
