A Quote by Louise Gluck

I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, deliberate silence. The unsaid, for me, exerts great power: often I wish an entire poem could be made in this vocabulary. It is analogous to the unseen.

Louise Gluck

Quote Topics

Am Attracted Could Deliberate Eloquent Entire Great Great Power Made Me Often Poem Power Silence Suggestion Unsaid Unseen Vocabulary Wish

Quote Author

Louise Gluck
American - Poet
Born: April 22, 1943

The unsaid, for me, exerts great power.

Louise Gluck

Poetry teaches us things that cannot be learned in prose, such as certain kinds of irony or the importance of the unsaid. The most important element of any poem is the part that is left unsaid. So the poetry frames the experience that lies beyond naming.

Sam Hamill

Any good movie is filled with secrets. If a director doesn't leave anything unsaid, it's a lousy picture. If a picture's unsaid, it's a lousy picture. If a picture is good, it's mysterious, with things unsaid.

Ernst Lubitsch

But we make such mistakes all the time, all through our lives. Wisdom, I suppose, is seeing this and acting upon it before it is too late. But it is often too late, isn't it? - and those things that we should have said are unsaid, and remain unsaid for ever.

Alexander McCall Smith

A novel is not a summary of its plot but a collection of instances, of luminous specific details that take us in the direction of the unsaid and unseen.

Charles Baxter

The pause - that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, howsoever felicitous, could accomplish it.

Mark Twain

There's a power that comes with silence. I had grown to fear the unsaid thing. So it felt like a release to say it-to admit that the risk wasn't just inside our walls-it was inside my skin. I was willing to claw, scratch, and bleed until I'd found it.

Ally Carter

The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?

Adrienne Rich

And surely one of the best rules in conversation is, never to say a thing which any of the company can reasonably wish had been left unsaid.

Jonathan Swift

Women often seemed to leave things unsaid, and in his limited experience it was what they did not say that proved the most trouble.

Robert Jordan

Often the difference between a successful marriage and a mediocre one consists of leaving about three or four things a day unsaid.

Harland Miller

Your experiences are what made you what you are today. So when tragedy happens in people's lives, and things are left unsaid, it can be very unsettling. The lack of closure can linger.

Michael Pitt

He played of love and loss and years of silence, words unsaid and vows unspoken, and all the spaces between his heart and theirs; and when he was done, and he'd set the violin back in its box, Will's eyes were closed, but Tessa's were full of tears.

Cassandra Clare

When I wear high heels I have a great vocabulary and I speak in paragraphs. I'm more eloquent. I plan to wear them more often.

Meg Ryan

I am increasingly attracted to restricting possibility in the poem by inflicting a form upon yourself. Once you impose some formal pattern on yourself, then the poem is pushing back. I think good poems are often the result of that kind of wrestling with the form.