Quiet friend who has come so far, feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring, what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine. In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there. And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am.

Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable, there we also stand always already quite near its transformation.

In one creative thought a thousand forgotten nights of love revive, filling it with sublimity and exaltation.

Do you remember how life yearned out of childhood toward the "great thing?" I see that it is now yearning forth beyond the great thing toward the greater one.

Our task is to listen to the news that is always arriving out of silence.

The artist's experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss.

If the Angel deigns to appear, it will be because you have convinced him, not by tears but by your humble resolve to be always beginning — to be a Beginner!