Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. –Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet
There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees. –Victor Hugo
It’s possible, I’m moving through the hard veins of heavy mountains, like an arc, alone; I’m so deep inside, I see no end in sight, and no distance: everything is getting near and everything near is turning to stone. –Rilke
Watching the moon at midnight, solitary, mid-sky, I knew myself completely, no part left out. -Izumi Shikubu
A man can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days. -Goethe
…the longer I live, the more necessary it seems to me to endure, to copy the whole dictation of existence to the end, for it might be that only the last sentence contains that small, perhaps inconspicuous word through which all laboriously learned and not understood orients itself toward glorious sense. –Rilke
Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope. –Edith Wharton
It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels. –Aldous Huxley
