“She followed slowly, taking a long time,As though there were some obstacles in the way;And yet: as though, once it was overcome,She would be beyond all walking, and would fly.”

“There comes a time when we have deposited in it all our firstlings, all beginning, all confidence, the seeds of all that which might perhaps some day come to be. And suddenly we realize: All that has sunk into a deep sea, and we don't even know just when. We never noticed it. As though some one were to collect all his money, and buy a feather with it and stick the feather in his hat: whish!--the first breeze will carry it away. Naturally he arrives home without his feather, and nothing remains for him but to look back and think when it would have flown.”

“They grope before them like blind people and find each the other as they would a door. Almost like children that dread the night, they press close into each other. And yet they are not afraid. There is nothing that might be against them: no yesterday, no morrow; for time is shattered. And they flower from its ruins.He does not ask: 'Your husband?'She does not ask: 'Your name?'For indeed they have found each other, to be unto themselves a new generation.They will give each other a hundred new names and take them all off again, gently, as one takes an earring off.”

“If there were a place that we didn't know of, and there,on some unsayable carpet, lovers displayedwhat they never could bring to mastery here – the boldexploits of their high-flying hearts,their towers of pleasure, their laddersthat have long since been standing where there was no ground, leaningjust on each other, trembling, - and could master all this,before the surrounding spectators, the innumerable soundless dead: Would these, then, throw down their final, forever saved-up,forever hidden, unknown to us, eternally validcoins of happiness before the at lastgenuinely smiling pair on the gratified carpet?”

“Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divinings, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.”

“This is the creature there has never been.They never knew it, and yet, none the less,they loved the way it moved, its suppleness,its neck, its very gaze, mild and serene.Not there, because they loved it, it behavedas though it were. They always left some space.And in that clear unpeopled space they savedit lightly reared its head, with scarce a traceof not being there. They fed it, not with corn,but only with the possibilityof being. And that was able to confersuch strength, its brow put forth a horn. One horn.Whitely it stole up to a maid - to bewithin the silver mirror and in her.”

“Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winterthat only by wintering through it will your heart survive.”