“Whom can I ask what I cameto make happen in the world?”

“LXXIXWhen I die, I want your hands on my eyes.I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands to pass their freshness over me once more.I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you to sniff the sea's aroma that we loved together,to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.I want what I love to continue to live,and you whom I love and sang above everything else.to continue to flourish, full-flowered.So that you can reach everything my love directs you to. So that my shadow can travel along in your hair,so that everything can learn the reason for my song.”

“Tonight I can write the saddest lines...Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer and these the last verses that I write for her.”

“Am I allowed to ask my bookwhether it's true I wrote it?”

“If you should ask me where I've been all this timeI have to say "Things happen."I have to dwell on stones darkening the earth,on the river ruined in its own duration:I know nothing save things the birds have lost,the sea I left behind, or my sister crying.Why this abundance of places? Why does day lockwith day? Why the dark night swilling roundin our mouths? And why the dead?”

“When I see the sea againhas the sea seen me or hasn’t it seen me?Why the waves ask meThe same that I ask them?And why do they hit the rockWith such a futile enthusiasm?Don’t they get tired of repeatingtheir declaration to the sand?”

“Everything is so alive, that I can be alive. Without moving I can see it all. In your life I see everything that lives.”