“It would be good to give much thought, beforeyou try to find words for something so lost,for those long childhood afternoons you knewthat vanished so completely -and why?We're still reminded-: sometimes by a rain,but we can no longer say what it means;life was never again so filled with meeting,with reunion and with passing onas back then, when nothing happened to usexcept what happens to things and creatures:we lived their world as something human,and became filled to the brim with figures.And became as lonely as a shepherdand as overburdened by vast distances,and summoned and stirred as from far away,and slowly, like a long new thread,introduced into that picture-sequencewhere now having to go on bewilders us.”

“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.”

“Being dead filled her beyond fulfillment. Like a fruit suffused with its own mystery and sweetness, she was filled with her vast death, which was so new, she could not understand that it had happened.”

“Everything in the world of things and animals is still filled with happening, which you can take part in.”

“Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words.”

“For our part, when we feel, we evaporate; ah, we breatheourselves out and away; with each new heartfirewe give off a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us:you're in my blood, this room, Spring itselfis filled with you . . . To what end? He can't hold us,we vanish within him and around him.”

“But this is what ... people are so often and disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment ...And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half broken things that they would like to call their happiness, and their futures?And so each of them loses himself to the other for the sake of the other person, and loses the other. And loses the vast possibilities ... in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come, nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment and poverty.”