Ahead of All Parting Quotes

“How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn’t touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn’t resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin’s bow,
which draws one voice out of two separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.

- Love Song”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose

“Again and again, however we know the landscape of love
and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,
and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others
fall: again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the flowers, face to face with the sky.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose

“Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner -- what is it?
if not the intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose

“Joy is a marvelous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose

“We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose

“Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander on the boulevards, up and down, restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose

“We say release, and radiance, and roses,”

We say release, and radiance, and roses,
and echo upon everything that's known;
and yet, behind the world our names enclose is
the nameless: our true archetype and home.

The sun seems male, and earth is like a woman,
the field is humble, and the forest proud;
but over everything we say, inhuman,
moves the forever-undetermined god.

We grow up; but the world remains a child.
Star and flower, in silence, watch us go.
And sometimes we appear to be the final
exam they must succeed on. And they do.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose

“Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need? Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke

“When something's let go of, it circles; and though we are rarely the center of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose

“Wenn du der Träumer bist, bin ich dein Traum.
Doch wenn du wachen willst, bin ich dein Wille”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose