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"And children are still the way you were ...as a child, sad and happy in just the same way and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no value."
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"Sometimes to return is a vulgarity."

"Eden is that old-fashioned house we dwell in every day Without suspecting our abode until we drive away."

"I think Wordsworth was as surprised to see me as I was him. It can't be usual to go to your favorite memory only to find someone already there, admiring the view ahead of you."

"And my grandmother had bought them in preference to other books, just as she would have preferred to take a house that had a gothic dovecot, or some other such piece of antiquity as would have a pleasant effect on the mind, filling it with a nostalgic longing for impossible journeys through the realms of time."

"I used to be a poet.My words were traded in marketplaces like pieces of gold.Merchants bought my verses for as much as they paid for saffron and Indian jade.Now I am old...drunk on wine and candle fumes.Alone in this barren room, I speak my psalms to the night air so as to entertain moths before they go off to die.I used to be a poet and my words were gold."

"Summer was a book of hope. That's why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe."
Explore more quotes by Rainer Maria Rilke

"Already the ripening barberries are redAnd the old asters hardly breathe in their beds.The man who is not rich now as summer goesWill wait and wait and never be himself.The man who cannot quietly close his eyescertain that there is vision after vision inside,simply waiting for nighttimeto rise all around him in darkness-it's all over for him, he's like an old man.Nothing else will come; no more days will openand everything that does happen will cheat him.Even you, my God. And you are like a stonethat draws him daily deeper into the depths."

"Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walkonly on feelings. That faces upwardand in its mirrorreceives heavenly roads, which travelalong themselves.That has learned to walk upon waterwhen it scoops,that walks upon wells,transfiguring every path.That steps into other hands,changes those that are like itinto a landscape:wanders and arrives within them,fills them with arrival."

"Who shows a child, just as they are? Who sets itin its constellation, and gives the measureof distance into its hand? Who makes a child's deathout of grey bread, that hardens, - or leaves itinside its round mouth like the coreof a shining apple? Killers areeasy to grasp. But this: death,the whole of death, before life,to hold it so softly, and not live in anger,cannot be expressed."

"Let your judgements have their own quiet, undisturbed development, which must, like all progress, come from deep within, and cannot in any way be pressed or hurried."

"The SolitaryAs one who has sailed across an unknown sea,among this rooted folk I am alone;the full days on their tables are their own,to me the distant is reality.A new world reaches to my very eyes,a place perhaps unpeopled as the moon;their slightest feelings they must analyze,and all their words have got the common tune.The things I brought with me from far away,compared with theirs, look strangely not the same:in their great country they were living things,but here they hold their breath, as if for shame."

"Who is there today who still cares about a well-finished death? No one. Even the rich, who could after all afford this luxury, are beginning to grow lazy and indifferent; the desire to have a death of one's own is becoming more and more rare. In a short time it will be as rare as a life of one's own."

"His gaze, bluntedby the unnumbered processionof iron bars, uncountedas his softly padded steps.Smooth motion of blood and sinewturning in its own, small circleprescribed by bars and walls...and skin, confined.Suddenly, without warning,a flash of light and imagepierces the caged brain,and passing through its beating heartto stillness finds its way."

"Why should you want to give up a child's wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from."

"Extinguish my eyes, I'll go on seeing you.Seal my ears, I'll go on hearing you.And without feet I can make my way to you,without a mouth I can swear your name.Break off my arms, I'll take hold of youwith my heart as with a hand.Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat.And if you consume my brain with fire,I'll feel you burn in every drop of my blood."
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