His gaze, blunted by the unnumbered procession of iron bars, uncounted as his softly padded steps. Smooth motion of blood and sinew turning in its own, small circle prescribed by bars and walls ...and skin, confined. Suddenly, without warning, a flas...
All things want to float.
I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.
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 oth...
A billion stars go spinning through the night, / glittering above your head, / But in you is the presence that will be / when all the stars are dead.
Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other.
Art too is just a way of living.
O Stunden in der Kindheit, da hinter den Figuren mehr als nur Vergangnes war und vor uns nicht die Zukunft.
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. As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of his powerful ...
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 winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.
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 behaved as though it were. They always ...
You who never arrived in my arms, Beloved, who were lost from the start, I don't even know what songs would please you. I have given up trying to recognize you in the surging wave of the next moment. All the immense images in me -- the far-off, deepl...
I live my life in growing orbits which move out over the things of the world.
You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world, for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone, and then no one outside learns of you. But the darkness pulls in everything: shapes and fires, animals and ...
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. ...
We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. That is all.
I believe that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living. Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered into our self; because everything intimate and ...
And those, who come together in the night and are twined in quivering pleasure, are performing a serious work and are heaping up sweetness, depth and force for the song of some coming poet, who will arise to express inexpressible ecstasies
Again and again, however we know the landscape of love and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names, and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others fall: again and again the two of us walk out together under the ancient trees, ...
Take your well-disciplined strengths, stretch them between the two great opposing poles, because inside human beings is where God learns.
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.
