The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge Quotes

“For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars-and it is not enough if one may think all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“And isn't the whole world yours? For how often you set it on fire with your love and saw it blaze and burn up and secretly replaced it with another world while everyone slept. You felt in such complete harmony with God, when every morning you asked him for a new earth, so that all the ones he had made could have their turn. You thought it would be shabby to save them and repair them; you used them up and held out your hands, again and again, for more world. For your love was equal to everything.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of... What's the use of telling someone that I am changing? If I'm changing, I am no longer who I was; and if I am something else, it's obvious that I have no acquaintances. And I can't possibly write to strangers.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“It's ridiculous. Here I sit in my little room, I, Brigge, who have got to be twenty-eight years old and about whom no one knows. I sit here and am nothing. And yet this nothing begins to think and thinks, up five flights of stairs, these thoughts on a gray Paris afternoon:

Is it possible, this nothing thinks, that one has not yet seen, recognized, and said anything real and important? Is it possible that one has had thousands of years of time to look, reflect, and write down, and that one has let the millennia pass away like a school recess in which one eats one's sandwich and an apple?
Yes, it is possible.

...Is it possible that in spite of inventions and progress, in spite of culture, religion, and worldly wisdom, that one has remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that one has even covered this surface, which would at least have been something, with an incredibly dull slipcover, so that it looks like living-room furniture during the summer vacation?
Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that the whole history of the world has been misunderstood? Is it possible that the past is false because one has always spoken of its masses, as if one was telling about a coming together of many people, instead of telling about the one person they were standing around, because he was alien and died?
Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that one believed one has to make up for everything that happened before one was born? Is it possible one would have to remind every single person that he arose from all earlier people so that he would know it, and not let himself be talked out of it by the others, who see it differently?
Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that all these people know very precisely a past that never was? Is it possible that everything real is nothing to them; that their life takes its course, connected to nothing, like a clock in an empty room?
Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that one knows nothing about girls, who are nevertheless alive? Is it possible that one says "the women", "the children", "the boys", and doesn't suspect (in spite of all one's education doesn't suspect) that for the longest time these words have no longer had a plural, but only innumerable singulars?
Yes, it is possible.

Is it possible that there are people who say "God" and think it is something they have in common? Just look at two schoolboys: one buys himself a knife, and the same day his neighbor buys one just like it. And after a week they show each other their knives and it turns out that they bear only the remotest resemblance to each other-so differently have they developed in different hands (Well, the mother of one of them says, if you boys always have to wear everything out right away). Ah, so: is it possible to believe that one could have a God without using him?
Yes, it is possible.

But, if all this is possible, has even an appearance of possibility-then for heaven's sake something has to happen. The first person who comes along, the one who has had this disquieting thought, must begin to accomplish some of what has been missed; even if he is just anyone, not the most suitable person: there is simply no one else there. This young, irrelevant foreigner, Brigge, will have to sit himself down five flights up and write, day and night, he will just have to write, and that will be that.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“... And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not until they have turned to blood within us, to glance, to gesture, nameless and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves - not until then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“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.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“with poems one accomplishes so little when one writes them early. One should hold off and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, a long life if possible, and then, right at the end, one could perhaps write ten lines that are good.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Verses are not, as people think, feelings (those one has early enough) -- they are experiences. For the sake of a verse one must see many cities, men, and things, one must know the animals feel how birds fly, and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Who is there today who still cares about a well-finished death? No one. Even the rich, who could after all afford this luxury, are beginning to grow lazy and indifferent; the desire to have a death of one's own is becoming more and more rare. In a short time it will be as rare as a life of one's own.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Früher wusste man (oder vielleicht ahnte man es), dass man den Tod in sich hatte wir die Frucht den Kern. Die Kinder hatten einen kleinen und die Erwachsenen einen großen. Die Frauen hatten ihn im Schoß und die Männer in der Brust. Den hatte man, und das gab einem eine eigentümliche Würde und einen stillen Stolz.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge

“Outside much has changed. I don't know how. But inside and before you, O my God, inside before you, spectator, are we not without action? We discover, indeed, that we do not know our part, we look for a mirror, we want to rub off the make-up and remove the counterfeit and be real. But somewhere a bit of mummery still sticks to us that we forget. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows, we do not notice that the corners of our lips are twisted. And thus we go about, a laughing-stock, a mere half-thing: neither existing, not actors.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Aber nun, da so vieles anders wird, ist es nicht an uns, uns zu verändern? Könnten wir nicht versuchen, uns ein wenig zu entwickeln, und unseren Anteil Arbeit in der Liebe langsam auf uns nehmen nach und nach? Man hat uns alle ihre Mühsal erspart, und so ist sie uns unter die Zerstreuungen geglitten, wie in eines Kindes Spiellade manchmal ein Stück echter Spitze fällt und freut und nicht mehr freut und endlich daliegt unter Zerbrochenem und Auseinandergenommenem, schlechter als alles. Wir sind verdorben vom leichten Genuß wie alle Dilettanten und stehen im Geruch der Meisterschaft. Wie aber, wenn wir unsere Erfolge verachteten, wie, wenn wir ganz von vorne begännen die Arbeit der Liebe zu lernen, die immer für uns getan worden ist? Wie, wenn wir hingingen und Anfänger würden, nun, da sich vieles verändert.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“To think, for instance, that I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several. There are people who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out, it gets dirty, it splits at the folds, it stretches, like gloves one has worn on a journey. These are thrifty, simple people; they do not change their face, they never even have it cleaned. It is good enough, they say, and who can prove to them the contrary? The question of course arises, since they have several faces, what do they do with the others? Thhey store them up. Their children will wear them. But sometimes, too, it happens that their dogs go out with them on. And why not? A face is a face.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“There I sat, probably looking so dreadful that nothing had the courage to stand by me; not even the candle, which I had just done the service of lighting it, would have anything to do with me. It burned away there by itself, as in an empty room. My last hope was always the window. I imagined that outside there, there still might be something that belonged to me, even now, even in this sudden poverty of dying. But scarcely had I looked thither when I wished the window had been barricaded, blocked up, like the wall. For now I knew that things were going on out there in the same indifferent way, that out there, too, there was nothing but my loneliness. The loneliness I had brought upon myself and to the greatness of which my heart no longer stood in any sort of proportion. People came to my mind whom I had once left, and I did not understand how one could forsake people.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“Yes, he knew that we was withdrawing from everything: not merely from human beings. A moment more and everything will have lost its meaning, and that table and the cup, and the chair to which he clings, all the near and the commonplace, will have become unintelligible, strange and heavy. So he sat there and waited until it should have happened. And defended himself no longer.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

“There exists a creature which is perfectly harmless; when it passes before your eyes you scarcely notice it and forget it again immediately. But as soon as it invisibly gets somehow into your ears, it develops there, it hatches, as it were, and cases have been known where it was penetrated even into the brain and has thriven devastatingly in that organ, like those pneumococci in dogs that gain entrance through the nose.
This creature is one's neighbor.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge