“I am, O Anxious One. Don't you hear my voicesurging forth with all my earthly feelings?They yearn so high, that they have sprouted wingsand whitely fly in circles round your face.My soul, dressed in silence, rises upand stands alone before you: can't you see?don't you know that my prayer is growing ripeupon your vision as upon a tree?If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream.But when you want to wake, I am your wish,and I grow strong with all magnificenceand turn myself into a star's vast silenceabove the strange and distant city, Time.”

“I am too alone in the world, and yet not alone enoughto make every moment holy.I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enoughjust to lie before you like a thing,shrewd and secretive.I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,as it goes toward action;and in those quiet, sometimes hardly moving times,when something is coming near,I want to be with those who know secret thingsor else alone.I want to be a mirror for your whole body,and I never want to be blind, or to be too oldto hold up your heavy and swaying picture.I want to unfold.I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,because where I am folded, there I am a lie.and I want my grasp of things to betrue before you. I want to describe myselflike a painting that I looked atclosely for a long time,like a saying that I finally understood,like the pitcher I use every day,like the face of my mother,like a shipthat carried methrough the wildest storm of all.”

“O how all things are far removed and long have passed away. I do believe the star, whose light my face reflects, is dead and has been so for many thousand years. I had a vision of a passing boat and heard some voices saying disquieting things. I heard a clock strike in some distant house... but in which house?... I long to quiet my anxious heart and stand beneath the sky's immensity. I long to pray... And one of all the stars must still exist. I do believe that I would know which one alone endured, and which like a white city stands at the ray's end shining in the heavens. ”

“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.... and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”

“My life is not this steeply sloping hour,in which you see me hurrying.Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree;I am only one of my many mouths,and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.I am the rest between two notes,which are somehow always in discordbecause Death’s note wants to climb over—but in the dark interval, reconciled,they stay there trembling.And the song goes on, beautiful.”

“Quiet friend who has come so far,feel how your breathing makes more space around you.Let this darkness be a bell towerand you the bell. As you ring,what batters you becomes your strength.Move back and forth into the change.What is it like, such intensity of pain?If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.In this uncontainable night,be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,the meaning discovered there.And if the world has ceased to hear you,say to the silent earth: I flow.To the rushing water, speak: I am.- Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower”

“Now you feel how nothing clings to you; your vast shell reaches into endless space, and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow. Illuminated in your infinite peace, a billion stars go spinning through the night, blazinghigh above your head. But IN you is the presence that will be, when all the stars are dead.”