We are unutterably alone essentially, especially in the things most intimate and most important.

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

I am the rest between two notes which are somehow always in discord.

To work is to live without dying.

Nearly everything that matters is a challenge, and everything matters.

But you, divine poet, you sang on till the end as the swarm of rejected maenads attacked you, shrieking, you overpowered their noise with harmony, and from pure destruction arose your transfigured song.

This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.