“We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.”
Source: Meadowlands (1996), "Nostos"
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Louise Glück 10
American poet 1943–2023Related quotes

10 June 2014 from same speech, YouTube audio excerpt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKnCCzAv3s4&t=34 via the DC Examiner
2010s, 2014

“Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.”
The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Source: Earthsea Books, The Farthest Shore (1972), Chapter 1, "The Rowan Tree"

“Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.”

“Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke.”
Source: England, England

Source: 1980s, That Benediction is Where You Are (1985), p. 18
Context: From childhood we are trained to have problems. When we are sent to school, we have to learn how to write, how to read, and all the rest of it. How to write becomes a problem to the child. Please follow this carefully. Mathematics becomes a problem, history becomes a problem, as does chemistry. So the child is educated, from childhood, to live with problems — the problem of God, problem of a dozen things. So our brains are conditioned, trained, educated to live with problems. From childhood we have done this. What happens when a brain is educated in problems? It can never solve problems; it can only create more problems. When a brain that is trained to have problems, and to live with problems, solves one problem, in the very solution of that problem, it creates more problems. From childhood we are trained, educated to live with problems and, therefore, being centred in problems, we can never solve any problem completely. It is only the free brain that is not conditioned to problems that can solve problems. It is one of our constant burdens to have problems all the time. Therefore our brains are never quiet, free to observe, to look. So we are asking: Is it possible not to have a single problem but to face problems? But to understand those problems, and to totally resolve them, the brain must be free.