A Year with Rilke Quotes

“Often when I imagine you your wholeness cascades into many shapes. You run like a herd of luminous deer and I am dark, I am forest. You are a wheel at which I stand, whose dark spokes sometimes catch me up, revolve me nearer to the center.”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“Be forever dead in Eurydice, and climb back singing. Climb praising as you return to connection. Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient, be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings. Be. And know as well the need to not be: let that ground of all that changes bring you to completion now. To all that has run its course, and to the vast unsayable numbers of beings abounding in Nature, add yourself gladly, and cancel the cost. Sonnets to Orpheus II, 13”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“To love does not mean to surrender, dissolve, and merge with another person. It is the noble opportunity for an individual to ripen, to become something in and of himself. To become a world in response to another is a great immodest challenge that has sought him out and called him forth.”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“Springtimes have needed you. And there are stars expecting you to notice them.”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke: Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke

“I want to ask you, as clearly as I can, to bear with patience all that is unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves, as if they were rooms yet to enter or books written in a foreign language. Don’t dig for answers that can’t be given you yet: you cannot live them now. For everything must be lived. Live the questions now, perhaps then, someday, you will gradually, without noticing, live into the answer. Worpswede, July 16, 1903 Letters to a Young Poet”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“To speak again of solitude, it becomes ever clearer that in truth there is nothing we can choose or avoid. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves and act as if this were not so. That is all we can do. How much better to realize from the start that that is what we are, and to proceed from there. It can, of course, make us dizzy, for everything our eyes rest upon will be taken from us, no longer is anything near, and what is far is endlessly far. Borgeby gärd, Sweden, August 12, 1904 Letters to a Young Poet”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“Only what is within you is near; all else is far. And this within: so packed and pressured, barely contained, unsayable.”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“Between hammers pounding,
the heart exists, like the tongue
between the teeth—which still,
however, does the praising.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, A Year With Rilke Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke

“When Things Close In

It feels as though I make my own way
through massive rock
like a vein of ore
alone, encased.

I am so deep inside it
I can't see the path or any distance:
everything is close
and everything closing in on me
has turned to stone.

Since I still don't know enough about pain,
this terrible darkness makes me small,
If it's you, though—

press down hard on me, break in
that I may know the weight of your hand
and you, the fullness of my cry.”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke: Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Already my gaze is upon the hill, the sunlit one.
The way to it, barely begun, lies ahead.
So we are grasped by what we have not grasped,
full of promise, shining in the distance.

It changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something we barely sense, but are;
a movement beckons, answering our movement . . .
But we just feel the wind against us.”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke: Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke

“Want the change. Be inspired by the flame where everything shines as it disappears. The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much as the curve of the body as it turns away. What locks itself in sameness has congealed. Is it safer to be gray and numb? What turns hard becomes rigid and is easily shattered. Pour yourself out like a fountain. Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins. Every happiness is the child of a separation it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming a laurel, dares you to become the wind. Sonnets to Orpheus II, 12”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“To travel far, far—and that first morning’s awakening under a new sky! And to find oneself in it—no, to discover more of oneself there. To experience there, too, where one has never been before, one’s own continuity of being and, at the same time, to feel that something in your heart, somehow indigenous to this new land, is coming to life from the moment of your arrival. You feel your blood infused with some new intelligence, wondrously nourished by things you had no way of knowing.”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“She who reconciles the ill-matched threads of her life, and weaves them gratefully into a single cloth— it’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall and clears it for a different celebration”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“to free themselves from the familiar, you slowly take one black tree and set it against the sky: slender, alone. And you have made a world. It is big and like a word, still ripening in silence. And though your mind would fabricate its meaning, your eyes tenderly let go of what they see.”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“In the course of my work this last long winter, I have experienced a truth more completely than ever before: that life’s bestowal of riches already surpasses any subsequent impoverishment. What, then, remains to be feared? Only that we might forget this! But around and within us, how much it helps to remember!”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“God Speaks I am, you anxious one. Don’t you sense me, ready to break into being at your touch? My murmurings surround you like shadowy wings. Can’t you see me standing before you cloaked in stillness? Hasn’t my longing ripened in you from the beginning as fruit ripens on a branch? I am the dream you are dreaming. When you want to awaken, I am waiting. I grow strong in the beauty you behold. And with the silence of stars I enfold your cities made by time. The Book of Hours I, 19”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“Never Yet Spoken I believe in all that has never yet been spoken. I want to free what waits within me so that what no one has dared to wish for may for once spring clear without my contriving. From The Book of Hours I, 12”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“Love Song How shall I hold my soul to not intrude upon yours? How shall I lift it beyond you to other things? I would gladly lodge it with lost objects in the dark, in some far still place that does not tremble when you tremble. But all that touches us, you and me, plays us together, like the bow of a violin that from two strings draws forth one voice. On what instrument are we strung? What musician is playing us? Oh sweet song.”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“Listeners at Last Oh when, when, when will we ever have enough of whining and defining? Haven’t champions in the weaving of words been here already? Why keep on trying? Are not people perpetually, over and over and over again, assaulted by books as by buzzing alarms? When, between two books, the quieting sky appears, or merely a patch of earth at evening— rejoice… Louder than all the storms, louder than all the oceans, people have been crying out: What abundance of quietude the Universe must yield, if we screaming humans can hear the crickets, and if the stars in the screamed-at ether can appease our hearts! Let the farthest, oldest, most ancient ancestors speak to us! And let us be listeners at last, humans finally able to hear.”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“And suddenly you know: that was enough. You rise and there appears before you in all its longings and hesitations the shape of what you lived. Book of Images”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“It’s here in all the pieces of my shame that now I find myself again. From The Book of Hours II, 2”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“What should I say about your tendency to doubt your struggle or to harmonize your inner and outer life? My wish is ever strong that you find enough patience within you and enough simplicity to have faith. May you gain more and more trust in what is challenging, and confidence in the solitude you bear. Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right in any case. Furnborg, Jonsered, Sweden, November 4, 1904 Letters to a Young Poet”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“How surely gravity’s law, strong as an ocean current, takes hold of even the smallest thing and pulls it toward the heart of the world. Each thing— each stone, blossom, child— is held in place. Only we, in our arrogance, push out beyond what we each belong to for some empty freedom. If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees. Instead we entangle ourselves in knots of our own making and struggle, lonely and confused. So, like children, we begin again to learn from the things, because they are in God’s heart; they have never left him. The Book of Hours II, 16”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“What Is Within You Think, dear sir, of the world you carry within you…be it remembrance of your own childhood or longing for your own future. Only be attentive to what is arising in you, and prize it above all that you perceive around you. What happens most deeply inside you is worthy of your whole love. Work with that and don’t waste too much time and courage explaining it to other people. Rome, December 23, 1903 Letters to a Young Poet”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“To Darkness You, darkness, of whom I am born— I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes all the rest. But the dark embraces everything: shapes and shadows, creatures and me, people, nations—just as they are. From The Book of Hours I, 11”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“Go to the Limits of Your Longing God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. From The Book of Hours I, 59”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“Winning does not tempt that man. His growth is this: to be defeated by ever greater forces. Book of Images”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“Through All That Happens As you unfold as an artist, just keep on, quietly and earnestly, growing through all that happens to you. You cannot disrupt this process more violently than by looking outside yourself for answers that may only be found by attending to your innermost feeling. Paris, February 17, 1903 Letters to a Young Poet”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke

“And Everything Matters The tasks that have been entrusted to us are often difficult. Almost everything that matters is difficult, and everything matters. Worpswede, July 16, 1903 Letters to a Young Poet”
― Anita Barrows, A Year with Rilke