“They all have tired mouthsand bright seamless souls.And a longing (as for sin)sometimes haunts their dreams.They are almost all alike; in God's gardens they keep still,like many, many intervalsin his might and melody.Only when they spread their wingsare they wakers of a wind:as if God with his broad sculptor-hands leafed through the pagesin the dark book of the beginning.”

“You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house-- , and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,-- you had just walked down them and vanished. And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening...”

“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.”

“And many a day's hours were like that. As if someone fashioned my likeness somewherein order to torment it slowly with needles.I felt each sharp prick of his playing,and it was: as if a rain fell on mein which all things change.”

“You who never arrived in my arms, Beloved, who were lost from the start, I don't even know what songs would please you. I have given up trying to recognize you in the surging wave of the next moment. All the immense images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and un-suspected turns in the path, and those powerful lands that were once pulsing with the life of the gods-- all rise within me to mean you, who forever elude me. You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house-- , and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,-- you had just walked down them and vanished. And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening... ”

“Just as the creative artist is not allowed to choose, neither is he permitted to turn his back on anything: a single refusal, and he is cast out of the state of grace and becomes sinful all the way through.”

“We cannot know his legendary headwith eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torsois still suffused with brilliance from inside,like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,gleams in all its power. Otherwisethe curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor coulda smile run through the placid hips and thighsto that dark center where procreation flared.Otherwise this stone would seem defacedbeneath the translucent cascade of the shouldersand would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:would not, from all the borders of itself,burst like a star: for here there is no placethat does not see you. You must change your life.”