The Book of Images Quotes

“Girls, there are poets who learn from you
to say, what you, in your aloneness, are;
and they learn through you to live distantness,
as the evenings through the great stars
become accustomed to eternity.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

“Whoever you are: in the evening step out
of your room, where you know everything;
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let it go...”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

“I would like to sing someone to sleep,
to sit beside someone and be there.
I would like to rock you and sing softly
and go with you to and from sleep.
I would like to be the one in the house
who knew: The night was cold.
And I would like to listen in and listen out
into you, into the world, into the woods.
The clocks shout to one another striking,
and one sees to the bottom of time.
And down below one last, strange man walks by
and rouses a strange dog.
And after that comes silence.
I have laid my eyes upon you wide;
and they hold you gently and let you go
when something stirs in the dark.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

“They all have tired mouths
and bright seamless souls.
And a longing (as for sin)
sometimes haunts their dreams.

They are almost all alike;
in God's gardens they keep still,
like many, many intervals
in his might and melody.

Only when they spread their wings
are they wakers of a wind:
as if God with his broad sculptor-
hands leafed through the pages
in the dark book of the beginning.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

“It wasn't his, it wasn't my fault,
we both had nothing except patience,
but Death has none.
I saw him come (how meanly!)
and I watched him as he took and took:
none of it I could claim as mine. ”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

“The park is high. And as out of a house
I step out of its glimmering half-light
into openness and evening. Into the wind,
the same wind that the clouds feel,
the bright rivers and the turning mills
that stand slowly grinding at the sky's edge.
Now I too am a thing held in its hand,
the smallest thing under the sky. --Look:

Is that one sky?:
Blissfully lucid blue,
into which ever purer clouds throng,
and under it all white in endless changes,
and over it that huge, thin-spun gray,
pulsing warmly as on red underpaint,
and over everything this silent radiance
of a setting sun.

Miraculous structure,
moved within itself and upheld by itself,
shaping figures, giant wings, faults
and high mountain ridges before the first star
and suddenly, there: a gate into such
distances as perhaps only birds know...”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

“And many a day's hours were like that.
As if someone fashioned my likeness somewhere
in order to torment it slowly with needles.
I felt each sharp prick of his playing,
and it was: as if a rain fell on me
in which all things change.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

“His smile was so soft and fine:
like gleaming old ivory,
like homesickness, like a Christmas snowfall
in the dark village, like turquoise
around which many pearls are fashioned,
like moonlight
on a favorite book.

-in Mädchenmelancholie (Girls' melancholy)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

“Let your beauty manifest itself
without talking and calculation.
You are silent. It says for you: I am.
And comes in meaning thousandfold,
comes at long last over everyone.

(Gieb deine Schönheit immer hin
ohne Rechnen und Reden.
Du schweigst. Sie sagt für dich: Ich bin.
Und kommt in tausendfachem Sinn,
kommt endlich über jeden.)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

“Out of infinite desires rise
finite deeds like weak fountains
that fall back in early trembling arcs.
But those, which otherwise in us
keep hidden, our happy strengths —
they come forth in these dancing tears.

(Aus unendlichen Sehnsüchten steigen
endliche Taten wie schwache Fontänen,
die sich zeitig und zitternd neigen.
Aber, die sich uns sonst verschweigen,
unsere fröhlichen kräfte — zeigen
sich in diesen tanzenden Tränen.)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

“Death is great.
We are his completely
with laughing eyes.
When we feel ourselves immersed in life,
he dares to weep
immersed in us.

(Der Tod ist groß.
Wir sind die Seinen
lachenden Munds.
Wenn wir uns mitten im Leben meinen,
wagt er zu weinen
mitten in uns.)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

“The Solitary

As one who has sailed across an unknown sea,
among this rooted folk I am alone;
the full days on their tables are their own,
to me the distant is reality.

A new world reaches to my very eyes,
a place perhaps unpeopled as the moon;
their slightest feelings they must analyze,
and all their words have got the common tune.

The things I brought with me from far away,
compared with theirs, look strangely not the same:
in their great country they were living things,
but here they hold their breath, as if for shame.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

“Señor, ya es tiempo. Grande ha sido el verano.
Tiende tu sombra sobre los relojes
de sol, y desata los vientos por el campo.
Haz madurar las frutas más tardías,
dales dos días más de sur,
fuérzales a acabar, y echa
el último dulzor al vino recio.
Quien ya no tiene casa, no la construirá.
Quien ahora está solo, lo estará mucho tiempo.
Velará, leerá, escribirá largas cartas
e irá por los paseos, deambulando
de un lado a otro, mientras las hojas caen.”
― Rainer María Rilke, The Book of Images

“Deep, calm, siren-like, and magical.


-Two Poems to Hans Thomas on his Sixtieth Birthday,”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

“Progress

And again my inmost life rushes louder,
as if it moved now between steeper banks.
Objects become ever more related to me,
and all pictures ever more perused.
I feel myself more trusting in the nameless:
with my senses, as with birds, I reach
into the windy heavens from the oak,
and into the small ponds' broken-off day
my feeling sinks, as if it stood on fishes.

(Fortschritt

Und wieder rauscht mein tiefes Leben lauter,
als ob es jetzt in breitern Ufern ginge.
Immer verwandter werden mir die Dinge
und alle Bilder immer angeschauter.
Dem Namenlosen fühl ich mich vertrauter:
Mit meinen Sinnen, wie mit Vögeln, reiche
ich in die windigen Himmel aus der Eiche,
und in den abgebrochnen Tag der Teiche
sinkt, wie auf Fischen stehend, mein Gefühl.)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

“Mit deinen Augen, welche müde kaum
von der verbrauchten Schwelle sich befrein,
hebst du ganz langsam einen schwarzen Baum
und stellst ihn vor den Himmel: schlank, allein.
Und hast die Welt gemacht. Und sie ist groß
und wie ein Wort, das noch im Schweigen reift.
Und wie dein Wille ihren Sinn begreift,
lassen sie deine Augen zärtlich los ...”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images

“Die Blätter fallen, fallen wie von weit,
als welkten in den Himmeln ferne Gärten;
sie fallen mit verneinender Gebärde.

Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde
aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit.

Wir alle fallen. Diese Hand da fällt.
Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in allen.

Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen
unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images