Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive.

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

Look, we don't love like flowers with only one season behind us; when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms.

Were it possible for us to see further than our knowledge reaches, and yet a little way beyond the outworks of our divinings, perhaps we would endure our sadnesses with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new has entered into us, something unknown; our feelings grow mute in shy perplexity, everything in us withdraws, a stillness comes, and the new, which no one knows, stands in the midst of it and is silent.

Fame, that public destruction of one in process of becoming, into whose building-ground the mob breaks, displacing his stones.

It was not in me It came and went I wanted to hold it It was held by wine (I no longer know what it was)

Only those sadnesses are dangerous and bad which one carries about among people in order to drown them out.