A man speaking English beautifully chooses to speak in French, which he speaks with greater difficulty, so that he is obliged to choose his words carefully, forced to give up fluency and to find the hard words that come with difficulty, and then after all that finding he puts it all back into English, a new English containing all the difficulty of the French, of the coining of thought in a second language, a new English with the power to change English forever. This is Samuel Beckett. This is his great work. It is the thing that speaks. Surrender.

— Salman Rushdie

Only what is within you is near; all else is far.
And this within: so packed and pressured,
barely contained, unsayable.
The island could be a star so insignificant

that space in its terrible blackness takes no note
and mindlessly destroys it.
Thus, unillumined and unheard,
expecting nothing

but that all this may yet come to an end,
it continues doggedly its self-invented course,
alone, outside the patterns made
by planets and the suns they orbit.

— Rilke, New Poems

Maybe my theory of meter will be helpful to people. It turns out that helping is the main thing. If you feel that you have a use, if you think that your writing furthers life or truth in some way, then you keep writing. But if that feeling stops, you have to find something else to do. Or die, I guess. Or mow the lawn, or go somewhere and do something, like visit a historic house, or clean up a room, or teach people something that you think is worth knowing.

— Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

As if lying in some crater on the moon,
each farm is encircled by its earthen banks.
And like orphans the gardens inside
are dressed and combed the same

by the storm that raises them so roughly,
scaring them all the time with threats of death.
That’s when you stay indoors, gazing into
the crooked mirror at the assorted things

reflected there. Toward evening one of you
steps outside the door and draws from the harmonica
a sound as soft as weeping

such as you heard once in a distant port.
Out there, silhouetted against the sky,
one of the sheep stands motionless on the far dike.

— Rilke, New Poems

Have you heard that it was good to gain the day?
I also say it is good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit
……..in which they are won.

— Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 18

This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.

— Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 24

If you look at zero you see nothing; but look through it and you will see the world.

— Robert Kaplan

For to know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker.

— Samuel Beckett

When trying to hold an interview with reality face to face, without the aid of either words or concepts, we realize that what is intelligible to our mind is but a thin surface of the profoundly undisclosed, a ripple of inveterate silence that remains immune to curiosity and inquisitiveness like distant foliage in the dark.

— Abraham Joshua Heschel

The tide erases the path through the mud flats
and makes things on all sides look the same.
But the little island out there has closed its eyes.
The dike around it walls its people in.

They are as if born into a sleep
that silently blurs all destinations.
They seldom speak,
and every utterance is like an epitaph

for something cast ashore, some foreign object
that comes unexplained, and just stays.
So is everything their gaze encounters from childhood on:

not intended for them, random, unwieldy,
sent from someone else
to underscore their loneliness.

— Rilke, New Poems

Every something is an echo of nothing.

— John Cage

Silence is not the absence of sound. It’s a physical place, a destination with value and meaning in a chaotic world, somewhere arrived at with difficulty and left with regret.

— Kenneth Turan

I had a feeling once about Mathematics, that I saw it all — Depth beyond depth was revealed to me — the Byss and the Abyss. I saw, as one might see the transit of Venus — or even the Lord Mayor’s Show, a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus. I saw exactly how it happened and why the tergiversation was inevitable: and how the one step involved all the others. . . . But it was after dinner and I let it go!

— Winston Churchill

Between hammers pounding,
the heart exists, like the tongue
between the teeth — which still,
however, does the praising.

— Rilke, From the Ninth Duino Elegy

Backward I see in my own days where I sweated through
……fog with linguists and contenders,
I have no mockings or arguments, I witness and wait.

— Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 4

Gold leads a pampered life, protected by banks,
on intimate terms with the best people.
The homeless beggar is no more than a lost coin
fallen behind the bookcase or in the dustpile under the bed.

In the finest shops, money is right at home,
loving to parade itself in flowers, silk and furs.
He, the silent one, stands outside this display.
Money, near him, stops breathing.

How does his outstretched hand ever close at night?
Fate, each morning, picks it up again,
holds it out there, naked and raw.

In order to grasp what his life is like,
to see it and cherish it, you would need a song,
a song only a god could bear to hear.

— Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 19