The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation
Rainer Maria Rilke
Top 10 Best Quotes
“There is death in life, and it astonishes me that we pretend to ignore this: death, whose unforgiving presence we experience with each change we survive because we must learn to die slowly. We must learn to die: That is all of life.”
“If people took some simple pleasure in reality (which is entirely independent of time), they would never have needed to come up with the idea that they could ever again lose anything with which they had truly bonded. No constellation is as steadfast, no accomplishment as irrevocable as a connection between human beings which, at the very moment it becomes visible, works more forcefully in those invisible depths where our existence is as lasting as gold lodged in stone, more constant than a star.”
“It is still this death which continues inside of me, which works in me, which transforms my heart, which deepens the red of my blood, which bears down heavily on the life that had been ours so that this death becomes a bittersweet drop coursing through my veins and permeating everything, and which ought to be mine forever.”
“I am very concerned when I imagine how strangled and cut off you currently live, afraid of touching anything that is filled with memories (and what is not filled with memories?). You will freeze in place if you remain this way. You must not, dear. You have to move. You have to return to his things. You have to touch with your hands his things, which through their manifold relations and affinity are after all also yours. You must, Sidie (this is the task that this incomprehensible fate imposes upon you), you must continue his life inside of yours insofar as it was unfinished; his life has now passed onto yours. You, who quite truly knew him, can quite truly continue in his spirit and on his path. Make it the task of your mourning to explore what he had expected of you, had hoped for you, had wished to happen to you. If I could just convince you, my dear friend, that his influence has not vanished from your existence”
“The loss that now casts its deep shadow over you is also a task to endure and a matter of coming to terms with all of the suffering that may befall us—for once the mother leaves us, we lose all protection. You have to undergo the terrible process of becoming more resilient. But in return... (and you have also begun to feel this already) in return the power of protection now becomes yours, and all the gentleness which until now you had been able to receive will blossom more and more inside of you into your new capacity to share it as something—inherited and acquired unspeakably, at the deepest price—of your own.”
“Continue to believe that with your feeling and with your work you take part in what is greatest. The more strongly you cultivate this belief inside of you, the more it will give rise to reality and world.”
“All of our true relationships, all of our enduring experiences touch upon and pass through everything, Sidie, through life and death. We must live in both, be intimately at home in both.”
“You become more protective and more capable of granting protection exactly to the extent that you have lost and now lack protection. The solitude into which you were cast so violently makes you capable of balancing out the loneliness of others to exactly the same degree.”
“Where things become truly difficult and unbearable, we find ourselves in a place already very close to its transformation.”
“What shouldn't a person be able to achieve with precisely the kind of force that is needed to dissolve the powerful, tremendous attachments of life! From that moment on I have known with certainty that the worst things, and even despair, are only a kind of abundance and an onslaught of existence that one decision of the heart could turn into its opposiite. Where things become truly difficult and unbearable, we find ourselves in a place already very close to its transformation.”
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Book Keywords:
grief, loss, reality, death, mourning, life, relationships, work
