“Suddenly I'm as if cast out,and this solitude surrounds meas something vast and unbounded,when my feeling, standing on the hillsof my breasts, cries out for wingsor for an end.”

“And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.”

“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.”

“Never forget that solitude is my lot ... I implore those who love me to love my solitude."(Letter to Mimi Romanelli, May 11, 1910)”

“For our part, when we feel, we evaporate; ah, we breatheourselves out and away; with each new heartfirewe give off a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us:you're in my blood, this room, Spring itselfis filled with you . . . To what end? He can't hold us,we vanish within him and around him.”

“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.”

“Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant...”