You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house - , and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon, - you had just walked down them and vanished. And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening.

We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them.... Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

Speaking of August Rodin: He raised his world above us in an immense arc, and made it a part of nature.

Truly it is glorious, our being here.

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)

A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.