78 Quotes by Jack Gilbert

We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.

I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can.

A man in Black and White"Some years ago, a child was askedwhether he liked radio or television best. The boysaid radio, because the pictures were better.364

The Abandoned ValleyCan you understand being alone so longyou would go out in the middle of the nightand put a bucket into the wellso you could feel something down theretug at the other end of the rope?

Waking At NightThe blue river is grey at morningand evening. There is twilightat dawn and dusk. I lie in the darkwondering if this quiet in me nowis a beginning or an end.

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,and frightening that it does not quite.

We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.

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.

The woman is not just a pleasure, nor even a problem. She is a meniscus that allows the absolute to have a shape, that lets him skate however briefly on the mystery, her presence luminous on the ordinary and the grand. Like the odor at night in Pittsburgh’s empty streets after summer rain on maples and sycamore.