God... sat down for a moment when the dog was finished in order to watch it... and to know that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it could not have been made better.
And those who come together in the night and are entwined in rocking delight do an earnest work and gather sweetnesses, gather depth and strength for the song of some coming poet, who will arise to speak of ecstasies beyond telling.
Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you.
I would describe myself like a landscape I’ve studied at length, in detail; like a word I’m coming to understand; like a pitcher I pour from at mealtime; like my mother’s face; like a ship that carried me when the waters raged.
To keep growing, silently and earnestly, through your while development; you couldn’t disturb it any more violently than by looking outside and waiting for outside answers to question that only your innermost feeling, in your quietest hour, can perhaps answer.
You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, 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.
Who has not sat, afraid, before his heart’s curtain?
In spite of all the farmer’s work and worry, he can’t reach down to where the seed is slowly transmuted into summer. The earth bestows.
Was soll ich mit meinem Munde? Mit meiner Nacht? Mit meinem Tag? Ich habe keine Geliebte, kein Haus, keine Stelle auf der ich lebe.
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.
The essence of love lies not in communion, but in the fact that each partner forces the other to become something, something infinitely great, the extreme limit of his strength.
Confess to yourself in the deepest hour of the night whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. Dig deep into your heart, where the answer spreads its roots in your being, and ask yourself solemnly, Must I write?
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.
What an unilateral life, when from the material of a renunciation, we must fashion something we love.
The comprehensible slips away, is transformed; instead of possession one learns connection.
Let me put aside every desire, so that my heart grows used to its farthest spaces. Better that it live fully aware, in the terror of its stars, than as if protected, soothed by what is near.
Je mehr Liebe man gibt, desto mehr besitzt man davon.
Ist dir Trinken bitter, werde Wein.
Verweilung, auch am Verstrautesten nicht, ist uns gegeben.
And yet they are in us, those who have long since passed away, as natural disposition, as burden on our destiny, as blood that throbs, and as gesture that rises up out of the depths of time.