“THE WAIT: It is life in slow motion,it's the heart in reverse,it's a hope-and-a-half:too much and too little at once.It's a train that suddenlystops with no station around,and we can hear the cricket,and, leaning out the carriagedoor, we vainly contemplatea wind we feel that stirsthe blooming meadows, the meadowsmade imaginary by this stop.”

“The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.”

“Losing too is still ours; and even forgettingstill has a shape in the kingdom of transformation.When something's let go of, it circles; and though we arerarely the centerof the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelouscurve.”

“It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living. Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition where we cannot remain standing. That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us, the presence that has been added, has entered our heart, has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, - is already in our bloodstream. And we don't know what it was. We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. We can't say who has come, perhaps we will never know, but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to life than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, the more it becomes our fate.”

“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.”

“How they are all about, these gentlemenIn chamberlains' apparel, stocked and laced,Like night around their order's star and gemAnd growing ever darker, stony-faced,And these, their ladies, fragile, wan, but proppedHigh by their bodice, one hand loosely dropped,Small like its collar, on the toy King-Charles:How they surround each one of these who stoppedTo read and contemplate the objects d'art,Of which some pieces still are theirs, not ours.Whit exquisite decorum they allow usA life of whose dimensions we seem sureAnd which they cannot grasp. They were aliveTo bloom, that is be fair; we, to mature,That is to be of darkness and to strive.”

“That's my window. This minuteSo gently did I alightFrom sleep--was still floating in it.Where has my life its limitAnd where begins the night?I could fancy all things around meWere nothing but I as yet;Like a crystal's depth, profoundlyMute, translucent, unlit.I have space to spare inside meFor the stars, too: so full of roomFeels my heart; so lightlyWould it let go of him, whomFor all I know I have startedTo love, it may be to hold.Strange, as if never charted,Stares my fortune untold.Why is it I am beddedBeneath this infinitude,Fragrant like a meadow,Hither and thither moved,Calling out, yet fearingSomeone might hear the cry,Destined to disappearingWithin another I.”