"I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can."
"I would say Pittsburgh softly each time before throwing him up. Whisper Pittsburgh with my mouth against the tiny ear and throw him higher. Pittsburgh and happiness high up. The only way to leave even the smallest trace. So that all his life her son would feel gladness unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined city of steel in America. Each time almost remembering something maybe important that got lost."
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Source: Jack Gilbert (2013). “The Great Fires: Poems, 1982-1992”, p.36, Knopf
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"The heart lies to itself because it must."
"We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars."
"We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world."
"Being alive is so extraordinary I don’t know why people limit it to riches, pride, security—all of those things life is built on. People miss so much because they want money and comfort and pride, a house and a job to pay for the house. And they have to get a car. You can’t see anything from a car. It’s moving too fast. People take vacations. That’s their reward—the vacation. Why not the life?"
"I ask myself what is the sound of women? What is the word for that still thing I have hunted inside them for so long? Deep inside the avalanche of joy, the thing deeper in the dark, and deeper still in the bed where we are lost. Deeper, deeper down where a woman's heart is holding its breath, where something very far away in that body is becoming something we don't have a name for."