Welcome to the web’s most comprehensive site of quotations by women. 43,939 quotations are searchable by topic, by author's name, or by keyword. Many of them appear in no other collection. And new ones are added continually.
Search by Topic:
Find quotations by TOPIC (coffee, love, dogs)
or search alphabetically below.
Search by Last Name:
Search by Keyword:
Louise Glück
-
“Always nights I feel the ocean / Biting at my life.”
-
“Birth, not death, is the hard loss.”
-
“... one never / Gets so close to anyone within experience.”
-
“We had codes / In our house.”
-
“Seven years I watched the next-door / Lady stroll her empty mate.”
-
“My first house shall be built on these sands, / My second in the sea.”
-
“Nights I turn to you to hold me / but you are not there.”
-
“You have only to wait, they will find you. / The geese flying low over the marsh, / glittering in black water. / They find you.”
-
“And you never say / Leave me / since the dead do not like being alone.”
-
“The garden admires you. / For your sake it smears itself with green pigment, / the ecstatic reds of the roses, / so that you will come to it with your lovers.”
-
“Then begins / the terrible charity of marriage, / husband and wife / climbing the green hill in gold light / until there is no hill, / only a flat plain stopped by the sky.”
-
“Of two sisters / one is always the watcher, / one the dancer.”
-
“... our parents merged into the one / totemic creature: / Come, she said. Come to Mother.”
-
“I sleep so you will be alive, / it is that simple.”
-
“I have to tell you what I've learned, that I know now / what happens to the dreamers. / They don't feel it when they change. One day / they wake, they dress, they are old.”
-
“Why love what you will lose? / There is nothing else to love.”
-
“... mothers weep at their daughters' weddings, / everyone knows that, though / for whose youth one cannot say.”
-
“The soul is silent. / If it speaks at all / it speaks in dreams.”
-
“We don't have a dog. / We have a hostile cat. / I think Sam's / intelligent; he / resents being a pet.”
-
“The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last. ”
-
“The unsaid, for me, exerts great power ...”
-
“We look at the world once, in childhood, / The rest is memory.”
-
“You know why you cook? Because / you like control. A person who cooks is a person who likes / to create debt.”
-
“The master said You must write what you see. / But what I see does not move me. / The master answered Change What You See.”
-
“Solace of the night sky, / the hardly moving / face of the clock.”
-
“We respect, here in America, / what is concrete, visible. We ask / What is it for? What does it lead to?”
-
“We had the problem of age, the problem of wishing to linger. / Not needing, anymore, even to make a contribution. / Merely wishing to linger: to be, to be here.”
-
“There was a time / only certainty gave me / any joy. Imagine — / certainty, a dead thing.”
-
“To get born, your body makes a pact with death, / and from that moment, all it tries to do is cheat — .”
-
“You ask the sea, what can you promise me / and it speaks the truth; it says erasure.”
-
“My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer / I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar, / like what I remember of love when I was young --.”
-
“In the window, the moon is hanging over the earth, / meaningless but full of messages. / It's dead, it's always been dead, / but it pretends to be something else, / burning like a star, and convincingly, so that you feel sometimes / it could actually make something grow on earth.”
-
“The love of form is a love of endings.”
Louise Glück, U.S. poet
(1943)