No, we don't accomplish our love in a single year as the flowers do; an immemorial sap flows up through our arms when we love. Dear girl, this: that we loved, inside us, not One who would someday appear, but seething multitudes; not just a single child, but also the fathers lying in our depths like fallen mountains; also the dried-up riverbeds of ancient mothers-;also the whole soundless landscape under the clouded or clear sky of its destiny -; all this, my dear, preceded you.

At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; in a smell that is in no way inferior to the smell of the sea, bitter where it borders on taste, and more honeysweet where you feel it touching the first sounds. Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost.

A person isn't who they are during the last conversation you had with them - they're who they've been throughout your whole relationship.

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.

Nothing strange should befall us, but only that which has long belonged to us. We will gradually learn to realize that that which we call destiny goes forth from within people, not from without into them.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'hierarchies? and even if one of thempressed me against his heart: I would be consumedin that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothingbut the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,and we are so awed because it serenely disdainsto annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading!