“Praise the world to the angel, not what can’t be talked about.You can’t impress him with your grand emotions. In the grand cosmoswhere he so intensely feels, you’re just a novice. So showhim some simple thing shaped for generation after generationuntil it lives in our hands and in our eyes, and it’s ours.Tell him about things. He’ll stand amazed, just as you didbeside the ropemaker in Rome or the potter on the Nile.Show him how happy a thing can be, how innocent and ours;how even grief’s lament purely determines its own shape,serves as a thing, or dies in a thing — and escapesIn ecstasy beyond the violin.”

“How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise it high enough, past you, to other things?”

“This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.”

“Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.”

“How can I keep my soul in me, so thatit doesn’t touch your soul? How can I raiseit high enough, past you, to other things?I would like to shelter it, among remotelost objects, in some dark and silent placethat doesn’t resonate when your depths resound.Yet everything that touches us, me and you,takes us together like a violin’s bow,which draws one voice out of two separate strings.Upon what instrument are we two spanned?And what musician holds us in his hand?Oh sweetest song.- Love Song”

“I am so afraid of people's words.They describe so distinctly everything:And this they call dog and that they call house,here the start and there the end.I worry about their mockery with words,they know everything, what will be, what was;no mountain is still miraculous;and their house and yard lead right up to God.I want to warn and object: Let the things be!I enjoy listening to the sound they are making.But you always touch: and they hush and stand still.That's how you kill.”

“How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.”