“Suddenly, from all the green around you,something-you don't know what-has disappeared;you feel it creeping closer to the window,in total silence. From the nearby woodyou hear the urgent whistling of a plover,reminding you of someone's Saint Jerome:so much solitude and passion comefrom that one voice, whose fierce request the downpourwill grant. The walls, with their ancient portraits, glideaway from us, cautiously, as thoughthey weren't supposed to hear what we are saying.And reflected on the faded tapestries now;the chill, uncertain sunlight of those longchildhood hours when you were so afraid.- Before Summer Rain”

“I am, O Anxious One. Don't you hear my voicesurging forth with all my earthly feelings?They yearn so high, that they have sprouted wingsand whitely fly in circles round your face.My soul, dressed in silence, rises upand stands alone before you: can't you see?don't you know that my prayer is growing ripeupon your vision as upon a tree?If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream.But when you want to wake, I am your wish,and I grow strong with all magnificenceand turn myself into a star's vast silenceabove the strange and distant city, Time.”

“Why don't you think of [God] as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity... the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are.”

“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.”

“What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours—that is what you must be able to attain.”

“How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.”

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”