A billion stars go spinning through the night, glittering above your head, But in you is the presence that will be when all the stars are dead.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

A complete sharing between two people is an impossibility and whenever it seems, nevertheless, to exist, it is a narrowing, a mutual agreement which robs either one member or both of his fullest freedom and development. But, once the realization is accepted that, even between the closest human beings, infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky!

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Again and again, however we know the landscape of Loveland 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

A good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude. Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist a wonderful living side by side can grow up if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

A kind of memory that tells us that what we're now striving for was once nearer and truer and attached to us with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance, there it was breath. After the first home the second one seems drought and strangely sexed.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

All things want to float.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Already the ripening barberries are remand the old asters hardly breathe in their beds. The man who is not rich now as summer goes Will wait and wait and never be himself. The man who cannot quietly close his ascertain that there is vision after vision inside, simply waiting for nighttime to rise all around him in darkness-it's all over for him, he's like an old man. Nothing else will come; no more days will operand everything that does happen will cheat him. Even you, my God. And you are like a stone that draws him daily deeper into the depths.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

And children are still the way you were ...as a child, sad and happy in just the same way and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children, and the grownups are nothing, and their dignity has no value.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

And in fact the artist's experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss. And if instead of "heat" one could say "sex";- sex in the great, pure sense of the word, free of any sin attached to it by the Church, - then his art would be very great and infinitely important. His poetic power is great and as strong as a primal instinct; it has its own relentless rhythms in itself and explodes from him like a volcano.

— Rainer Maria Rilke