“I love the dark hours of my being.My mind deepens into them.There I can find, as in old letters,the days of my life, already lived,and held like a legend, and understood.”

“Never forget that solitude is my lot ... I implore those who love me to love my solitude."(Letter to Mimi Romanelli, May 11, 1910)”

“ERANNA TO SAPPHOO You wild adept at throwing!Like a spear by other things, I'd lainthere beside my next of kin. Your strainflung me far. To where's beyond my knowing.None can bring me back again.Sisters think upon me as they twine,and the house is full of warm relation.I alone am out of the design,and I tremble like a supplication;for the lovely goddess all creationbowers in legend lives this life of mine.SAPPHO TO ERANNAWith unrest I want to inundate you,want to brandish you, you vine-wreathed stave.Want, like death itself, to penetrate youand to pass you onwards like the graveto the All: to all these things that wait you.”

“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.”

“I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.”

“And many a day's hours were like that. As if someone fashioned my likeness somewherein order to torment it slowly with needles.I felt each sharp prick of his playing,and it was: as if a rain fell on mein which all things change.”

“Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.”