“We can so easily slip back from what we have struggled to attain, abruptly, into a life we never wanted; can find that we are trapped, as in a dream, and die there, without ever waking up. This can occur. Anyone who has lifted his blood into a years-long work may find that he can't sustain it, the force of gravity is irresistible, and it falls back, worthless. For somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work.”

“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.”

“O trees of life, O when are you wintering?We are not unified. We have no instinctslike those of migratory birds. Useless, and late,we force ourselves, suddenly, onto the wind,and fall down to an indifferent lake.We realise flowering and fading together.And somewhere lions still roam. Never knowing,as long as they have their splendour, of any weakness.”

“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.”

“The claims which the difficult work of love lays upon our development are more than life-sized, and as beginners we are not equal to them. But if we continue to hold out and take this love upon ourselves as a burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in all the light and frivolous play behind which mankind have concealed themselves from the most serious gravity of their existence,-then perhaps some small progress and some alleviation will become perceptible to those who come long after us; that would be much.”

“We discover that we do not know our role; we look for a mirror; we want to remove our make-up and take off what is false and real. But somewhere a piece of disguise that we forgot still sticks to us. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows; we do not notice that the corners of our mouth are bent. And so we walk around, a mockery and a mere half: neither having achieved being nor actors.”

“And we, spectators always, everywhere,looking at, never out of, everything!It fills us. We arrange it. It collapses.We re-arrange it, and collapse ourselves.Who's turned us round like this, so that we always,do what we may, retain the attitudeof someone who's departing? Just as he,on the last hill, that shows him all his valleyfor the last time, will turn and stop and linger,we live our lives, for ever taking leave.”