I want to unfold. Let no place in me hold itself closed, for where I am closed, I am false.

Weren't you always distracted by expectation, as if every event announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you going and coming and often staying all night.).

And you suddenly know: It was here! You pull yourself together, and there stands an irrevocable year of anguish and vision and prayer.

Love and death are the great gifts that are given to us; mostly they are passed on unopened.

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism.

To be an artist means not to compute or count.

Young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.