"As once the winged energy of delightcarried you over childhood's dark abysses,now beyond your own life build the greatarch of unimagined bridges.Wonders happen if we can succeedin passing through the harshest danger;but only in a bright and purely granted achievement can we realize the wonder.To work with Things in the indescribable relationship is not too hard for us; the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,and being swept along is not enough.Take your practiced powers and stretch them out until they span the chasm between two contradictions...For the god wants to know himself in you."

"How he loved and yetwished to leave you: always both, at once."

"I would like to sing someone to sleep,to sit beside someone and be there.I would like to rock you and sing softlyand go with you to and from sleep.I would like to be the one in the housewho knew: The night was cold.And I would like to listen in and listen outinto you, into the world, into the woods.The clocks shout to one another striking,and one sees to the bottom of time.And down below one last, strange man walks byand rouses a strange dog.And after that comes silence.I have laid my eyes upon you wide;and they hold you gently and let you gowhen something stirs in the dark."

"So don't be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don't know what work they are accomplishing within you?"

"I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several."

"But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem:they might point to the catkins hangingfrom the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the raindescending on black earth in early spring. ---And we, who always think of happinessrising, would feel the emotionthat almost baffles uswhen a happy thing falls."

"I love the dark hours of my being.My mind deepens into them.There I can find, as in old letters,the days of my life, already lived,and held like a legend, and understood."

"A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude. Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist a wonderful living side by side can grow up if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky."

"I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world."

"A kind of memory that tells usthat what we're now striving for was oncenearer and truer and attached to uswith infinite tenderness. Here all is distance,there it was breath. After the first homethe second one seems draughty and strangely sexed."

"Works of Art are of an infinite loneliness."

"The only journey is the one within."

"Praise, my dear one.Let us disappear into praising.Nothing belongs to us."

"Why don't you think of [God] as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity... the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are."

"It is necessary - and toward this point our development will move, little by little - that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own."

"Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice."

"Death is our friend, precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love."

"I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone."

"But not you, O girl, nor yet his mother,stretched his eyebrows so fierce with expectation.Not for your mouth, you who hold him now,did his lips ripen into these fervent contours.Do you really think your quiet footstepscould have so convulsed him, you who move like dawn wind?True, you startled his heart; but older terrorsrushed into him with that first jolt to his emotions.Call him . . . you'll never quite retrieve him from those dark consorts.Yes, he wants to, he escapes; relieved, he makes a homein your familiar heart, takes root there and begins himself anew.But did he ever begin himself?"

"At bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed."

"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day."

"At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost."

"The more we speak of solitude, the clearer it becomes that at the bottom it is not something one can choose to take or leave. We are lonely. One can deceive oneself about it and act as if it were not so. That is all. But it is so much better to see that we are so, indeed even to presuppose it. It will make us dizzy, of course; because all the focal points on which our eyes were used to resting are taken away from us, there is nothing near us anymore, and everything distant is infinitely distant."

"It wasn't his, it wasn't my fault,we both had nothing except patience,but Death has none. I saw him come (how meanly!)and I watched him as he took and took:none of it I could claim as mine."

"Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything."

"Our being is continually undergoing and entering upon changes. ... We must strictly speaking at every moment give each other up and let each other go and not hold each other back."

"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."

"We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most intimate. From images that are full, the spirit plunges on to others that suddenly must be filled; there are no lakes till eternity. Here, falling is best. To fall from the mastered emotion into the guessed-at, and onward."

"It is clear that we must trust what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it."

"They (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment. And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half-broken things that they call their communion and that they would like to call their happiness, if that were possible, and their future? And so each of them loses himself for the sake of the other person, and loses the other, and many others who still wanted to come."

"Now I come to you full of future. And from habit we begin to live our past."

"Beauty is only the start of bearable terror."

"No waiting the beyond, no peering toward it,but longing to degrade not even death;we shall learn earthliness, and serve its ends,to feel its hands about us like a friend's."

"For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation."

"I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to remain idle are not precisely the days spend in the most profound activity. Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not take place until later, are nothing more than the last reverberations of a vast movement that occurs within us during idle days.In any case, it is very important to be idle with confidence, with devotion, possibly even with joy. The days when even our hands do not stir are so exceptionally quiet that it is hardly possible to raise them without hearing a whole lot."

"The free animalhas its dying always behind itand God in front of it, and its wayis the eternal way, as the spring flowing.Never, not for a moment, do we havepure space before us, where the flowersendlessly open."

"Sometimes she walks through the village in herlittle red dressall absorbed in restraining herself,and yet, despite herself, she seems to moveaccording to the rhythm of her life to come.She runs a bit, hesitates, stops,half-turns around...and, all while dreaming, shakes her headfor or against.Then she dances a few stepsthat she invents and forgets,no doubt finding out that lifemoves on too fast.It's not so much that she steps outof the small body enclosing her,but that all she carries in herselffrolics and ferments.It's this dress that she'll rememberlater in a sweet surrender;when her whole life is full of risks,the little red dress will always seem right."

"And the heart has become so tired, and the longing so vast."

"And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been."

"There are so many things about which some old man ought to tell one while one is little; for when one is grown one would know them as a matter of course."

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

"Whoever you are, go out into the evening,leaving your room, of which you know every bit;your house is the last before the infinite,whoever you are."

"Art is childhood."

"If only mankind could hold its own fertility in awe, which is one and the same whether it manifests itself in the spirit or in the flesh. For creativity in the spirit has its origins in the physical kind, is of one nature with it and only a more delicate, more rapt and less fleeting version of the carnal sort of sex."

"This, above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: must I write? Delve deep into yourself. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this question witha strong and simple 'I must' then build your lfie according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it."

"Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance."

"Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further."

"Nothing in this world can one imagine beforehand not the least thing. Everything is made up of so many unique particulars that cannot be foreseen."

"And when suddenlythe god stopped her and, with anguish in his cry,uttered the words: 'He has turned round' "she comprehended nothing and said softly: 'Who?"

"It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn."