“So it's back once more, back up the slope.Why do they always ruin my ropewith their cuts?I felt so ready the other day,Had a real foretaste of eternityIn my guts.Spoonfeeding me yet another sipfrom life's cup.I don't want it, won't take any more of it.Let me throw up.Life is medium rare and good, I see,And the world full of soup and bread,But it won't pass into the blood for me,Just goes to my head.It makes me ill, though others it feeds;Do see that I must deny it!For a thousand years from now at leastI'm keeping a diet.”

“There I sat, probably looking so dreadful that nothing had the courage to stand by me; not even the candle, which I had just done the service of lighting it, would have anything to do with me. It burned away there by itself, as in an empty room. My last hope was always the window. I imagined that outside there, there still might be something that belonged to me, even now, even in this sudden poverty of dying. But scarcely had I looked thither when I wished the window had been barricaded, blocked up, like the wall. For now I knew that things were going on out there in the same indifferent way, that out there, too, there was nothing but my loneliness. The loneliness I had brought upon myself and to the greatness of which my heart no longer stood in any sort of proportion. People came to my mind whom I had once left, and I did not understand how one could forsake people.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“MUSIC: Take me by the hand;it's so easy for you, Angel,for you are the roadeven while being immobile.You see, I'm scared no onehere will look for me again;I couldn't make use ofwhatever was given,so they abandoned me.At first the solitudecharmed me like a prelude,but so much music wounded me.”

“May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.”