Do not measure in terms of time: one year or ten years means nothing. For the artist there is no counting or tallying up; just ripening like the tree that does not force its sap and endures the storms of spring without fearing that summer will not come. But it will come. It comes, however, only to the patient ones who stand there as if all eternity lay before them — vast, still, untroubled. I learn this every day of my life, I learn it from hardships I am grateful for: patience is all.

— Rilke, Viareggio, April 23, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet

We, though we yearn for the One,
already feel the pull of other things.
Are not lovers ever pushing
at each other’s limits? Lovers,
who promised each other
vastness, hunt, and home. . . .

— Rilke, From the Fourth Duino Elegy

The shapeless heaps turn out to be beggars.
They reveal themselves as you pass by.
They are selling the nothing
their hands hold out.

— Rilke, New Poems

All feelings that gather you up and lift you are pure. If they twist and tear at your being, they are not. All tenderness you may feel for your childhood is good. Every emotion that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is good. Every intensification is good, if it seizes you entire and is not an intoxication or delusion, but a joy you can see into, clear to the bottom. Do you understand what I mean?

— Rilke, Furnborg, Jonsered, Sweden, November 4, 1904
Letters to a Young Poet

Center of all centers, innermost core,
almond sweetening in its self-embrace —
all of this, out to the stars,
is the fruit of your body. We greet you.

You feel how little clings to you now.
Endlessness is your shell,
and there, too, the strength.
It is summoned by the radiance

of the full and glowing suns
that wheel around you.
Yet those stars will be outlasted
by what you have begun.

— Rilke, New Poems

In my isolation, searching for a way to punish man’s universal egoism, it’s true that I was jerking off my imagination, looking for punishment everywhere, even in death. You amuse yourself as best you can when you’re short of friends and don’t often get a chance to go out, much less to emerge from yourself and fuck.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

Is it not time
to free ourselves from the beloved
even as we, trembling, endure the loving?
As the arrow endures the bowstring’s tension
so that, released, it travels farther.
For there is nowhere to remain.

— Rilke, From the First Duino Elegy

There is only one thing to do. Go into yourself. Examine your reason for writing. Discover whether it is rooted in the depths of your heart, and find out whether you would rather die than be forbidden to write. Above all, ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night, have I no choice but to write? Dig deep within for the truest answer, and if this answer is a strong and simple yes, then build your life upon this necessity. Your life henceforth, down to its most ordinary and insignificant moment, must prove and reveal this truth.

— Rilke, Paris, February 17, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for
may for once spring clear
without my contriving.

— Rilke, From The Book of Hours I, 12

We are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set around us; there is nothing that should frighten or torment us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through millennia of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly, that we, when we hold still, through a happy mimicry, can hardly be distinguished from everything that surrounds us.

— Rilke, Borgeby gärd, Sweden, August 12, 1904
Letters to a Young Poet

We kept repeating “Gentlemen first” over and over again like idiots à propos of everything and nothing. A private joke.

— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

A hunger drives us.
We want to contain it all in our naked hands,
our brimming senses, our speechless hearts.
We want to become it, or offer it — but to whom?
We could hold it forever — but, after all,
what can we keep? Not the beholding,
so slow to learn. Not anything that has happened here.
Nothing. There are the hurts. And, always, the hardships.
And there’s the long knowing of love — all of it
unsayable. Later, amidst the stars, we will see:
these are better unsaid.

— Rilke, From the Ninth Duino Elegy

People make a lot of assumptions when you change your name to Wolfgang and stop shaving.

— Wally, Dilbert

The Zen way of calligraphy is to write in the most straightforward, simple way as if you were a beginner, not trying to make something skillful or beautiful, but simply writing with full attention as if you were discovering what you were writing for the first time; then your full nature will be in your writing. This is the way of practice moment after moment.

— Richard Baker, Introduction to  Zen, Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki

That’s what happens to our secrets when we spread them abroad. There’s nothing terrible inside us or on earth or possibly in heaven itself except what hasn’t been said yet. We won’t be easy in our minds until everything has been said once and for all, then we’ll fall silent and we’ll no longer be afraid of keeping still. That will be the day.

— Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Journey to the End of the Night