Isa Urzu > Isa's Quotes

“It is still this death which continues inside of me, which works in me, which transforms my heart, which deepens the red of my blood, which bears down heavily on the life that had been ours so that this death becomes a bittersweet drop coursing through my veins and permeating everything, and which ought to be mine forever.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“There is death in life, and it astonishes me that we pretend to ignore this: death, whose unforgiving presence we experience with each change we survive because we must learn to die slowly. We must learn to die: That is
all of life.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“I am very concerned
when I imagine how strangled and cut off you currently live, afraid of
touching anything that is filled with memories (and what is not filled with
memories?). You will freeze in place if you remain this way. You must not,
dear. You have to move. You have to return to his things. You have to touch
with your hands his things, which through their manifold relations and
affinity are after all also yours. You must, Sidie (this is the task that this
incomprehensible fate imposes upon you), you must continue his life inside
of yours insofar as it was unfinished; his life has now passed onto yours.
You, who quite truly knew him, can quite truly continue in his spirit and on
his path. Make it the task of your mourning to explore what he had expected
of you, had hoped for you, had wished to happen to you. If I could just
convince you, my dear friend, that his influence has not vanished from your
existence”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“The loss that now casts its deep shadow over you is also a task to endure and a matter of coming to terms with all of the suffering that may befall us—for once the mother leaves us, we lose all protection. You have to undergo the terrible process of becoming more resilient. But in return... (and you have also begun to feel this already) in return the power of protection now becomes yours, and all the gentleness which until now you had been able to receive will blossom more and more inside of you into your new capacity to share it as something—inherited and acquired unspeakably, at the deepest price—of your own.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“You become more protective and more capable of granting protection exactly to the extent that you have lost and now lack protection. The solitude into which you were cast so violently makes you capable of balancing out the loneliness of others to exactly the same degree.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“It is a blessed moment of inner life when one decides or resolves from now on to love with all one’s strength and unflinchingly that which one fears the most, that which has made us—according to our own measure—suffer too much. Don’t you believe that once such a decision has been made, the word “separation” is nothing but a name stripped of all meaning,”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters for the Grieving Heart

“And while I am completely engulfed in my sadness, I am happy to sense that you exist, beautiful one. I am happy to have flung myself without fear into your beauty just as a bird flings itself into space. I am happy, dear, to have walked with steady faith on the waters of our uncertainty all the way to that island which is your heart and where pain blossoms.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters for the Grieving Heart

“The weight of this unexplained and perhaps greatest event, which only due to a misunder- standing has gained the reputation of being arbitrary and cruel, presses us (I think increasingly) more evenly and more deeply into life and places the utmost obligations on our slowly growing strengths,”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“If people took some simple pleasure in reality (which is entirely independent of time), they would never have needed to come up with the idea that they could ever again lose anything with which they had truly bonded. No constellation is as steadfast, no accomplishment as irrevocable as a connection between human beings which, at the very moment it becomes visible, works more forcefully in those invisible depths where our existence is as lasting as gold lodged in stone, more constant than a star.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“The sleeping and the waking, the bright and the dark, the voice and the silence... la présence et l'absence. All the presumed opposites which converge somewhere in one point where they sing the hymn of their union--and this place is, for the time being, our heart.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“Time itself does not “console,” as people say superficially; at best it assigns things to their proper place and creates an order.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“But as to the influence of the death of someone near on those he leaves behind, it has long seemed to me that this ought to be no other than a higher responsibility. Does the person who passes away not leave all the things he had begun in hundreds of ways to be continued by those who outlive him, if they had shared any kind of inner bond at all? In recent years I had to live through so many close experiences of death, but not one person has been taken from me without my having found the tasks around me increased. The weight of this unexplained and perhaps greatest event, which only due to a misunderstanding has gained the reputation of being arbitrary and cruel, presses us (I think increasingly) more evenly and more deeply into life and places the utmost obligations on our slowly growing strengths.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“I hope that somewhere in the thicket of your sprawling pain you may come upon the small spring that has already cried all the tears before, and, indeed, for you in advance.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation

“En el medio del odio me pareció que había dentro de mí un amor invencible.
El medio de las lágrimas me pareció que había dentro de mí una sonrisa invencible.
En medio del caos me pareció que había dentro de mí una calma invencible.
Me di cuenta, a pesar de todo, que en medio del invierno había dentro de mí un verano invencible. Y eso me hace feliz.
Porque no importa lo duro que el mundo empuje en mi contra, dentro de mí hay algo mejor empujando de vuelta.”
― Albert Camus

“Y debo decir que confío plenamente en la casualidad de haberte conocido. Que nunca intentaré olvidarte, y que si lo hiciera, no lo conseguiría. Que me encanta mirarte y que te hago mío con solo verte de lejos. Que adoro tus lunares y tu pecho me parece el paraíso. Que no fuiste el amor de mi vida, ni de mis días, ni de mi momento. Pero que te quise, y que te quiero, aunque estemos destinados a no ser.”
― Julio Cortázar

“Y este amor me conducirá a algún sitio. No puedo impedir que esta fuerte corriente me arrastre. Ya no tengo elección.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

“—Nunca nos quisimos —le dijo besándola en el pelo. —No hablés por mí —dijo la Maga cerrando los ojos—. Vos no podés saber si yo te quiero o no. Ni siquiera eso podés saber. —¿ Tan ciego me creés?”
― Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch

“1 de enero

Que este año me sea dado vivir en mí y no fantasear ni ser otras, que me sea dado ponerme buena y no buscar lo imposible sino la magia y extrañeza de este mundo que habito. Que me sean dados los deseos de vivir y conocer el mundo. Que me sea dado el interesarme por este mundo.”
― Alejandra Pizarnik

“Oh, Nastenka! You know, we thank some people for merely living at the same time as we do. I thank you for the fact that I met you, that I will remember you for all my life!”
― Dostoevskiy, Белые ночи. White Nights. Belye nochi Dostoevsky

“Oh mi amor, te extraño, me dolés en la piel, en la garganta, cada vez que respiro es como si el vacío me entrara en el pecho donde ya no estás”
― Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch