Annotations Quotes

“Illumination

Always there is something more to know

what lingers at the edge of thought

awaiting illumination as in

this second-hand book full

of annotations daring the margins in pencil

a light stroke as if

the writer of these small replies

meant not to leave them forever

meant to erase

evidence of this private interaction

Here a passage underlined there

a single star on the page

as in a night sky cloud-swept and hazy

where only the brightest appears

a tiny spark I follow

its coded message try to read in it

the direction of the solitary mind

that thought to pencil in

a jagged arrow It

is a bolt of lightning

where it strikes

I read the line over and over

as if I might discern

the little fires set

the flames of an idea licking the page

how knowledge burns Beyond

the exclamation point

its thin agreement angle of surprise

there are questions the word why

So much is left

untold Between

the printed words and the self-conscious scrawl

between what is said and not

white space framing the story

the way the past unwritten

eludes us So much

is implication the afterimage

of measured syntax always there

ghosting the margins that words

their black-lined authority

do not cross Even

as they rise up to meet us

the white page hovers beneath

silent incendiary waiting”
― Natasha Trethewey, Thrall

“And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Then try, like the first human being, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It will come.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“You are looking to the outside, and that above all you should not be doing now.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. Then assume this fate and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking after the rewards that may come from outside.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“All I wanted to do in the end was advise you to go through your development quietly and seriously ; you cannot disrupt it more than looking outwards.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“All I wanted to do in the end was advise you to go through your development quietly and seriously; you cannot disrupt it more than looking outwards.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Trust yourself and your instincts; even if you go wrong in your judgement, the natural growth of your inner life will gradually, over time, lead you to other insights.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Allow your verdicts their own quiet untroubled development which like all progress must come from deep within and cannot be forced or accelerated.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“And what matters is to live everything. ”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet