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The Book of Images
Rainer Maria Rilke
Top 10 Best 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.”
“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...”
“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.”
“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.”
“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. ”
“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...”
“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.”
“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)”
“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.”
“Deep, calm, siren-like, and magical. -Two Poems to Hans Thomas on his Sixtieth Birthday,”
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Book Keywords:
evening-in-skane, angels, world, time, death, love, sing, silence, loneliness, girls, listen, sleep, fragments-from-lost-days, entrance, solitary, sin