You are nearing the land that is life; you will recognize it by its seriousness.

We ignore the gods and fill our minds with trash.

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.

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.

Your preparation for the real world is not in the answers you’ve learned, but in the questions you’ve learned how to ask yourself.

We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most intimate.

So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp.