"I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can."
"WAKING AT NIGHT The blue river is grey at morning and evening. There is twilight at dawn and dusk. I lie in the dark wondering if this quiet in me now is a beginning or an end."
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Source: Jack Gilbert (2012). “Collected Poems”, p.354, 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."