Jack Gilbert Quotes

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

~ Jack Gilbert

I lie in the dark wondering if this quiet in me nowis a beginning or an end.

~ Jack Gilbert

We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.

~ Jack Gilbert

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must havethe stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthlessfurnace of this world. To make injustice the onlymeasure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

~ Jack Gilbert

The heart is a foreign country whose language none of us is good at.

~ Jack Gilbert

DuendeI can't remember her name.It's not as though I've been in bedwith that many women.The truth is I can't even rememberher face. I kind of know how strongher thighs were, and her beauty.But what I won't forgetis the way she tore openthe barbecued chicken with her hands,and wiped the grease on her breasts.

~ Jack Gilbert

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

~ Jack Gilbert

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.

~ Jack Gilbert

Once she said the world was an astonishing animal: light was its spirit and noise was its mind. That it was composed to feed on honor, but did not.

~ Jack Gilbert

Michiko Nogami (1946—1982)” Is she more apparent because she is notanymore forever? Is her whiteness more whitebecause she was the color of pale honey?A smokestack making the sky more visible.A dead woman filling the whole world. Michikosaid, “The roses you gave me kept me awakewith the sound of their petals falling.

~ Jack Gilbert

Suddenly this defeat.This rain.The blues gone grayAnd the browns gone grayAnd yellowA terrible amber.In the cold streetsYour warm body.In whatever roomYour warm body.Among all the peopleYour absenceThe people who are alwaysNot you.I have been easy with treesToo long.Too familiar with mountains.Joy has been a habit.NowSuddenlyThis rain.

~ Jack Gilbert

It is convenient for the old men to blame Eve. To insist we are damned because a country girl talked to the snake one afternoon long ago. Children must starve in Somalia for that, and old women be abandoned in our greatest cities. It’s why we will finally be thrown into the lakes of molten lead. Because she was confused by happiness that first time anyone said she was beautiful. Nevertheless, she must be the issue, so people won’t notice that rocks and galaxies, mathematics and rust are also created in His image.

~ Jack Gilbert

We are a singularity that makes music out of noise because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.

~ Jack Gilbert

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.

~ Jack Gilbert

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.

~ Jack Gilbert

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.

~ Jack Gilbert

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

~ Jack Gilbert

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods. Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt. But there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down but the angel flies up again taking us with her.

~ Jack Gilbert

We think the fire eats the wood. We are wrong. The wood reaches out to the flame. The fire licks at what the wood harbors, and the wood gives itself away to that intimacy, the manner in which we and the world meet each new day.

~ Jack Gilbert

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.

~ Jack Gilbert