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" It seems to me that the desire to make art produces an ongoing experience of longing, a restlessness sometimes, but not inevitably, played out romantically, or sexually. Always there seems something ahead, the next poem or story, visible, at least, apprehensible, but unreachable. To perceive it at all is to be haunted by it; some sound, some tone, becomes a torment — the poem embodying that sound seems to exist somewhere already finished. It’s like a lighthouse, except that, as one swims towards it, it backs away. "
― Louise Glück , Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry
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" The terror of this condition is that it has lost the power to yearn, while remembering a time when this was not so. It yearns only for respite, meaning release from hopelessness; it can imagine no more specific objective. Moreover, such confinement represents itself not as a tunnel, a darkness being passed through, but as a well; it is a place time cannot reach. Because response to the world is no longer actively felt, change--which is inherently active--seems impossible to imagine. This profound sense of having nothing, of being incapable of thought or response, this desolate emptiness runs contrary to every hope we have for ourselves; its atmosphere of finality reproduces the sensation of arrival that characterizes triumph, and mocks that sensation. At the same time, interior paralysis magnifies external vitality: all around, other people seem enviably caught up in, animated by feeling. "
― Louise Glück , Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry
