“O Lord, give each person his own personal death. / A thing that moves out of the same life he lived, / In which he had love, and intelligence, and trouble.”

“That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.”

“sometimes a man stands up during supperand walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.And another man, who remains inside his own house,stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,so that his children have to go far out into the worldtoward that same church, which he forgot.”

“In marriage, the point is not to achieve a rapid union by tearing down and toppling all boundaries. Rather, in a good marriage, each person appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude and thus shows him the greatest faith he can bestow.”

“All companionship can consist in only the strengthening of neighboring solitudes, giving oneself is by nature harmful to companionship: for when a person abandons himself, he is no longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to become closer to each other, there is no longer any ground beneath them and their being together is a continual falling – I have learned over and over again, there is scarcely anything more difficult than to love one another.”

“But this is what ... people are so often and disastrously wrong in doing: they (who by their very nature are impatient) fling themselves at each other when love takes hold of them, they scatter themselves, just as they are, in all their messiness, disorder, bewilderment ...And what can happen then? What can life do with this heap of half broken things that they would like to call their happiness, and their futures?And so each of them loses himself to the other for the sake of the other person, and loses the other. And loses the vast possibilities ... in exchange for an unfruitful confusion, out of which nothing more can come, nothing but a bit of disgust, disappointment and poverty.”

“only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn't exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.”