Jack Gilbert Quotations

You will love again, people say. Give it time. Me with time running out. Day after day of the everyday. What they call real life, made of eighth-inch gauge. Newness strutting around as if it were significant. Irony, neatness and rhyme pretending to be poetry. I want to go back to that time after Michiko's death when I cried every day among the trees. To the real. To the magnitude of pain, of being that much alive.

When I was walking in the mountains with the Japanese man and began to hear the water, he said, 'What is the sound of the waterfall?' 'Silence,' he finally told me.

THE ABANDONED VALLEY Can you understand being alone so long you would go out in the middle of the night and put a bucket into the well so you could feel something down there tug at the other end of the rope?

We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe. By meaningless bulk, vastness without size, power without consequence. The stubborn iteration that is present without being felt. Nothing the spirit can marry. Merely phenomenon and its physics. An endless, endless of going on. No habitat where the brain can recognize itself. No pertinence for the heart. Helpless duplication.

I had lived all of my youthful dreams, but I couldn't think of many adult ones. I finally realized that we don't have many dreams for adults because, historically, people have always died much younger than they do today.

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.

Question the bravery. Say it's not courage. Call it a passion.

I believe that Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all the years of sorrow that are to come.

But anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Like being there by that summer ocean on the other side of the island while love was fading out of her, the stars burning so extravagantly those nights that anyone could tell you they would never last.