"This is the creature there has never been.They never knew it, and yet, none the less,they loved the way it moved, its suppleness,its neck, its very gaze, mild and serene.Not there, because they loved it, it behavedas though it were. They always left some space.And in that clear unpeopled space they savedit lightly reared its head, with scarce a traceof not being there. They fed it, not with corn,but only with the possibilityof being. And that was able to confersuch strength, its brow put forth a horn. One horn.within the silver mirror and in her."

"Wishes are memories coming from our future!"

"No, no, one can imagine nothing in the world, not the least thing. Everything is composed of so many isolated details that are not to be foreseen. In one's imagining one passes over them and hasty as one is doesn't notice that they are missing. But realities are slow and indescribably detailed."

"Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his stronger existence. For beauty's nothing but the beginning of terror we're still just able to bear."

"That is fundamentally the only courage which is demanded of us: to be brave in the face of the strangest, most singular and most inexplicable things that can befall us."

"Great sadnesses, they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent."

"If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable."

"Here is the time for the sayable, here is its home.Speak and attest. More than everthe things we can live with are falling away,and ousting them, filling their place, a will with no image.Will beneath crusts which readily crackwhenever the act inside swells and seeks new borders."

"There is only one solitude, and it is great and is not easy to bear, and to almost everyone there come hours when they would gladly exchange it for some kind of communion, however banal and cheap, for the appearance of some slight harmony with the most easily available, with the most undeserving. But perhaps those are just the hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful like the growing of boys and sad like the beginning of Spring."

"When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small."

"I live my life in growing orbits which move out over this wondrous world, I am circling around God, around ancient towers and i have been circling for a thousand years. And I still dont know if I am an eagle or a storm or a great song."

"It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart."

"More belongs to marriage than four legs in a bed."

"But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing."

"No, my life is not this precipitous hourthrough which you see me passing at a run."

"I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

"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."

"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. ...live in the question."

"Think... of the world which you carry within yourself... and set it above everything that you notice about you. Your inmost happening is worth your whole love, that is what you must somehow work at, and not loose too much time and too much courage in explaining your attitude to people."

"Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

"Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers."

"I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough."

"Love is like the measles. The older you get it, the worse the attack."

"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."

"Now we wake up with our memoryand fix our gazes on that which was;whispering sweetness, which once coursed through us,sits silently beside us with loosened hair."

"It is good to be alone, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult should be one more reason to do it."

"We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all."

"It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything. I am not able to begin. I simply skip what should be the beginning."

"In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?"

"Wanting to change to improve a person's situation means offering him for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced other difficulties that will find him perhaps even more bewildered."

"All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood."

"Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other."

"It seems to him there area thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world."

"O Stunden in der Kindheit,da hinter den Figuren mehr als nurVergangnes war und vor uns nicht die Zukunft."

"Keep growing quietly and seriously throughout your whole development, you cannot disturb it more rudely than by looking outward and expecting from outside replies to questions that only your inmost feeling in your most hushed hour can perhaps answer."

"How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage."

"Then suddenly you're left all alonewith your body that can't love youand your will that can't save you."

"Earth, my dearest, oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over...Unspeakably, I have belonged to you, from the flush."

"For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it becomes clear that most people get to know only one corner of their room, a window seat, a strip of floor which they pace up and down."

"Don't take my devils away, because my angels may flee too."

"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."

"For even the best err in words when they are meant to mean most delicate and almost inexpressible things."

"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."

"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."

"It is always what I have already said: always the wish that you may find patience enough in yourself to endure, and simplicity enough to believe; that you may acquire more and more confidence in that which is difficult, and in your solitude among others. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, in any case."

"And isn't the whole world yours? For how often you set it on fire with your love and saw it blaze and burn up and secretly replaced it with another world while everyone slept. You felt in such complete harmony with God, when every morning you asked him for a new earth, so that all the ones he had made could have their turn. You thought it would be shabby to save them and repair them; you used them up and held out your hands, again and again, for more world. For your love was equal to everything."

"A billion stars go spinning through the night,glittering above your head,But in you is the presence that will bewhen all the stars are dead."

"We want it visible to showwhen even the most visible joy will reveal itselfonly when we have transformed it within.there's nowhere, my love, the world can existexpect within."

"In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love come to life again and fill it with majesty and exaltation. And those who come together in the nights and are entwined in rocking delight perform a solemn task and gather sweetness, depth, and strength for the song of some future poet, who will appear in order to say ecstasies that are unsayable."

"Long you must suffer, knowing not what,until suddenly out of spitefully chewed fruit your suffering's taste comes forth in you.Then you will love almost instantly what's tasted. No one will ever talk you out of it."