"The one so loved that a single lyreraised more lament than lamenting women ever did;and that from the lament a world arose in whicheverything was there again: woods and valleyand path and village, field and river and animal;and around this lament-world, just asaround the other earth, a sunand a starry silent heaven turned,a lament-heaven of disordered stars -- :This one so loved."

"Society in its wisdom has found ways of constructing refuges of all kinds, for since it has been disposed to make the love-life a pastime, it has also felt obliged to trivialize it, to make it cheap, risk-free and secure, as public pleasures usually are."

"I want to unfold.I don't want to be folded anywhere,because where I am folded,there I am a lie."

"Perhaps we would bear our sadnesses with greater trust than we have in our joys."

"Things are not as easily understood nor as expressible as people usually would like us to believe. Most happenings are beyond expression, they exist where a word has never intruded."

"Angels often do now know whether they walk among the dead or living."

"She who reconciles the ill-matched threadsOf her life, and weaves them gratefullyInto a single cloth " It's she who drives the loudmouths from the hallAnd clears it for a different celebration."

"The gnarled fidelity of an old habit."

"Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are moments when something new has entered into us something unknown."

"We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience."

"Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating."

"But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths."

"For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible."

"Perhaps the great renewal of the world will consist of this, that man and woman, freed of all confused feelings and desires, shall no longer seek each other as opposites, but simply as members of a family and neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to simply, earnestly, patiently, and jointly bear the heavy responsibility of sexuality that has been entrusted to them."

"Do you remember how this life of yours longed in childhood to belong to the grown-ups? I can see that it now longs to move on from them and is drawn to those who are greater yet. That is why it does not cease to be difficult, but also why it will not cease to grow."

"That is the principal thing: not to remain with the dream with the intention with the being in the mood but always forcibly to convert it into all things."

"Girls, there are poets who learn from youto say, what you, in your aloneness, are;and they learn through you to live distantness,as the evenings through the great starsbecome accustomed to eternity."

"Read the lines as if they were unknown to you, and you will feel in your inmost self how very much they are yours."

"Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winterthat only by wintering through it will your heart survive."

"He reproduced himself with so much humble objectivity, with the unquestioning, matter of fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there's another dog."

"If we only arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience. 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."

"Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his conscious reflection, his progressive steps, mysterious even to himself, should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition."

"His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world."

"Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being."

"Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us."

"If somewhere deep within me arises some essenceof having been a child, one I never experienced,perhaps the purest childness of my childhood,I don't want to know it. Without even looking,I want to form an angel out of itand hurl him into the foremost rankof screaming angels, to remind God."

"I believe that that love remains strong and intense in your memory because it was your first deep aloneness and the first inner work that you did on your life."

"One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one."

"Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other."

"And in fact the artist's experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss. And if instead of "heat" one could say "sex";- sex in the great, pure sense of the word, free of any sin attached to it by the Church, - then his art would be very great and infinitely important. His poetic power is great and as strong as a primal instinct; it has its own relentless rhythms in itself and explodes from him like a volcano."

"Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence."

"Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better."

"Isn't it time that, loving, we freed ourselves from the beloved, and, trembling, endured:as the arrow endures the bow, so as to be, in its flight, something more than itself?"

"What an unilateral life, when from the material of a renunciation, we must fashion something we love."

"The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing."