Jack Gilbert Quotes about Heart

The heart lies to itself because it must.

The heart lies to itself because it must.

Lying, Heart

Jack Gilbert (2012). “Collected Poems”, p.214, Knopf

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

Dream, Angel, Heart

Jack Gilbert, “Horses At Midnight Without A Moon”

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.

Jack Gilbert

Women, Heart, Dark

Jack Gilbert (2009). “Refusing Heaven”, p.26, Knopf

I like ornament at the right time, but I don't want a poem to be made out of decoration ... When I read the poems that matter to me, it stuns me how much the presence of the heart-in all its forms-is endlessly available there. To experience ourselves in an important way just knocks me out. It puzzles me why people have given that up for cleverness. Some of them are ingenious, more ingenious than I am, but so many of them aren't any good at being alive.

Jack Gilbert

Heart, People, Important

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

Heart, Brain, Habitat

Jack Gilbert (2012). “Collected Poems”, p.293, Knopf

Jack Gilbert Quotes about Heart

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