“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.”

“Lovers, if Angels could understand them, might utterstrange things in the midnight air. For it seems that everything'strying to hide us. Look, the trees exist; the houseswe live in still stand where they were. We onlypass everything by like a transposition of air.And all combines to suppress us, partly as shame,perhaps, and partly as inexpressible hope.”

“Every angel is terrible. And yet, alasI welcome you, almost fatal birds of the soul,knowing about you....If the archangel came now, the perilous one,from the back of the stars but one step lower and toward us,our own high beating heart would slay us. Who are you?You early successes, spoiled darlings of creation...”

“A man taken out of his room and, almost without preparation or transition, placed on the heights of a great mountain range, would feel something like that: an unequalled insecurity, an abandonment to the nameless, would almost annihilate him. He would feel he was falling or think he was being catapulted out into space or exploded into a thousand pieces: what a colossal lie his brain would have to invent in order to catch up with and explain the situation of his senses.”

“If there were a place that we didn't know of, and there,on some unsayable carpet, lovers displayedwhat they never could bring to mastery here – the boldexploits of their high-flying hearts,their towers of pleasure, their laddersthat have long since been standing where there was no ground, leaningjust on each other, trembling, - and could master all this,before the surrounding spectators, the innumerable soundless dead: Would these, then, throw down their final, forever saved-up,forever hidden, unknown to us, eternally validcoins of happiness before the at lastgenuinely smiling pair on the gratified carpet?”

“And these thingsthat keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient,they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue.They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts,into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be.”

“we are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. ... It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.”