Famous Quotes by Jack Gilbert

“Can 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?”

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

We are given the hope to make each other brave.

When they come back, if they do, they never come back as the same person. The loss changes everything.

We go on loving the dead, even as we love the living. Love is not diminished by absence, only sharpened.

It is a gift to know that darkness cannot hide us if we carry our own light.

The lost women I love all gather to me, and I go with them, to the places they lead me.

To be human is to love and lose and keep going, carrying the memory like a stone in the heart.

Love lasts by not lasting. Each love fixed and held in the heart brings another with it, opening the heart wider each time.

We risk everything to love fully because it is what we are here to do.

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.

To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

Poetry is not about beauty or love only. It is also darkness and the sorrow of having a human heart.

The heart is to be saved. The heart is to be broken.

I lie down in the fields of quiet where the mind is the only wilderness.

The soul is a wide place, ready to be made wider.

I ask for a violent patience, a strength that endures without bitterness.

The great fires were made by those who stayed and did not run.

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

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

In the world we live in, beauty remains, even if it has been shattered or scarred.