The Wild Iris
Louise Glück
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I don’t need your praise to survive. I was here first, before you were here, before you ever planted a garden. And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon are left, and the sea, and the wide field. I will constitute the field.”
“...whatever/ returns from oblivion/ returns to find a voice.”
“You must be taught to love me. Human beings must be taught to love silence and darkness.”
“I watched the first shoots like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly multiplying in the rows. I doubt you have a heart, in our understanding of that term. You who do not discriminate between the dead and the living, who are, in consequence, immune to foreshadowing...”
“things that can't move learn to see”
“the powerful are always lied to since the weak are always driven to panic”
“Some of us make our own light: a silver leaf like a path no one can use.”
“Remember that time you made the wish? I make a lot of wishes. The time I lied to you about the butterfly. I always wondered what you wished for. What do you think I wished for? I don't know. That I'd come back, that we'd somehow be together in the end. I wished for what I always wish for. I wished for another poem.”
“End of Winter” Over the still world, a bird calls waking solitary among black boughs. You wanted to be born; I let you be born. When has my grief ever gotten in the way of your pleasure? Plunging ahead into the dark and light at the same time eager for sensation as though you were some new thing, wanting to express yourselves all brilliance, all vivacity never thinking this would cost you anything, never imagining the sound of my voice as anything but part of you— you won’t hear it in the other world, not clearly again, not in birdcall or human cry, not the clear sound, only persistent echoing in all sound that means good-bye, good-bye— the one continuous line that binds us to each other.”
“You're in the garden, you're where John is, in the dirt, abstracted, holding his green trowel. This is how he gardens: fifteen minutes of intense effort, fifteen minutes of ecstatic contemplation.”
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Book Keywords:
ecstasy, nature, resilience, trees, god, happiness, mindfulness, gardening, poetry-quotes, wishes, contemplation, gardens, poem, work, poetry, powerful, weak
