the knowledge of impermanence that haunts our days is their very fragrance.

Often a star was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you out of the distant path, or as you walked under an open window, a violin yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.

Your life will still find its own paths from there, and that they may be good, rich, and wide is what I wish for you, more than I can say.

No, no, one can imagine nothing in the world, not the least thing. Everything is composed of so many isolated details that are not to be foreseen. In one's imagining one passes over them and hasty as one is doesn't notice that they are missing. But realities are slow and indescribably detailed.

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.

And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.

sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking, because of a church that stands somewhere in the East. And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead. And another man, who remains inside his own house, stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses, so that his children have to go far out into the world toward that same church, which he forgot.