Antje > Antje's Quotes

“I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.”
― Frida Kahlo

“So many books, so little time.”
― Frank Zappa

“Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.

This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose...

...Describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty - describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the objects that you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don’t blame it; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is not poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world’s sounds – wouldn’t you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance. - And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Why am I compelled to write?... Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and anger... To become more intimate with myself and you. To discover myself, to preserve myself, to make myself, to achieve self-autonomy. To dispell the myths that I am a mad prophet or a poor suffering soul. To convince myself that I am worthy and that what I have to say is not a pile of shit... Finally I write because I'm scared of writing, but I'm more scared of not writing.”
― Gloria Anzaldúa

“I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant...”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“You are not too old
and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out
its own secret.”
― Rilke

“At bottom, and just in the deepest and most important things, we are unutterably alone, and for one person to be able to advise or even help another, a lot must happen, a lot must go well, a whole constellation of things must come right in order once to succeed.”
― Rainer Marie Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! -
powers and people -

and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.

I have faith in nights.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“I've never believed in God. But I believe in Picasso.”
― Diego Rivera

“All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness”
― Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“So you go away from where you were afraid. Some stay; some go; it's a big difference, leaving the humiliations of childhood, the morbid fear. We didn't have much to say to each other, the ones that left and the ones that stayed. Children get shamed by fear but you can't tell the adults that; they don't care. They make children into dead things like they are. If there's something left alive in you, you run. You run from the poor little child on her knees; fear burned the skin off all right; she's still on her knees, dead and raw and tender.”
― Andrea Dworkin, Mercy

“Behind the story I tell is the one I don't.

Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.

Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence.”
― Dorothy Allison, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure

“We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Bingo Palace

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.”
― Mortimer J. Adler

“Alle waren jetzt damit beschäftigt, den Tisch zu decken, und niemand außer ihr bemerkte, was das Baby tat. Es drückte seine Lippen in das Innere von Avrams Hand, blökte ein sanftes und angenehmes Ba-ba-ba und genoss mit seinem ganzen Sein den Klang und das Kitzeln, das es wohl in den Lippen spürte. Auch in Oras Hals und Mund schwebte ein anregendes Summen, ihre Lippen spürten es auch, und in ihr murmelte es stimmlos ba-ba-ba.”
― David Grossman, Eine Frau flieht vor einer Nachricht