“Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:silence of paintings. You language where all languageends. You timestanding vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.Feelings for whom? O you the transformationof feelings into what?--: into audible landscape.You stranger: music. You heart-spacegrown out of us. The deepest space in us,which, rising above us, forces its way out,--holy departure:when the innermost point in us standsoutside, as the most practiced distance, as the otherside of the air:pure,boundless,no longer habitable.”

“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.”

“Be of good courage all is before you, and time passed in the difficult is never lost...What is required of us is that we live the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us.”

“But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.”

“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.”

“‎Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.So you mustn’t be frightened, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall.”

“God speaks to each of us as he makes us,then walks with us silently out of the night.These are the words we dimly hear:You, sent out beyond your recall,go to the limits of your longing.Embody me.Flare up like a flameand make big shadows I can move in.Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.Just keep going. No feeling is final.Don't let yourself lose me.Nearby is the country they call life.You will know it by its seriousness.Give me your hand.”