Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

My greatest affliction... is perhaps the major theme of my writings, the affliction of loneliness that follows me like a shadow, a very ponderous shadow too heavy to drag after me all of my days and nights.

Night brings out stars as sorrow shows us truths.

You cried for night - it falls. Now cry in darkness.

My soul is a dark ploughed field In the cold rain; My soul is a broken field Ploughed by pain.

Sorrow lies like a heartbeat behind everything I have written.

Grief is the agony of an instant; the indulgence of grief the blunder of a life.

This tragic brow, these closed eyes, eyebrows raised and knotted.

Grief, for me, is a moment-to-moment experience.

I'm from a city where the tears never end and the pain never stops.

When I'm in pain and grief and despair, my throat is clenched and my heart hurts.

It occured to her that pleasure, no matter how deep, was a ghostly, ephemeral thing. Love might make the world go round, but she was convinced it ws the cries of the badly wounded andf deeply afflicted which spun the universe on the great glass pole of it's axis.

Are you in pain, Frodo?' said Gandalf quietly as he rode by Frodo's side. 'Well, yes I am,' said Frodo. 'It is my shoulder. The wound aches, and the memory of darkness is heavy on me. It was a year ago today.' 'Alas! there are some wounds that cannot be wholly cured,' said Gandalf. 'I fear it may be so with mine,' said Frodo. 'There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same. I am wounded with knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden. Where shall I find rest?' Gandalf did not answer.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. What hours, O what black hours we have spent This night!

Writers write about what obsesses them. You draw those cards. I lost my mother when I was 14. My daughter died at the age of 6. I lost my faith as a Catholic. When I'm writing, the darkness is always there. I go where the pain is.

The face of the night will be an old wound that reopens each evening, impassive and living. The distant silence will ache like a soul, mute, in the dark. We'll speak to the night as it's whispering softly.

It had ceased raining in the night and he walked out on the road and called for the dog. He called and called. Standing in that inexplicable darkness. Where there was no sound anywhere save only the wind. After a while he sat in the road. He took off his hat and placed it on the tarmac before him and he bowed his head and held his face in his hands and wept. He sat there for a long time and after a while the east did gray and after a while the right and godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction.

Darkness does not leave us easily as we would hope.

There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation.

Small sorrows speak great ones are silent.

The dull pain of truth weights my soul, pulling it under. I am left hopelessly awake.

Oh, my darling, wish you were here! And my dark soul is happy again, because it does not know how to be anything else for very long, and because the pain is a deep dark sea in which I would drown if I did not sail my little craft steadily over the surface, steadily towards a sun which will never rise.

Sylvia's dark eyes widened. "You are more than you appear to be" "Yes. I am a monster of Darkness, a beast," he agreed with her. Her lips tilted up. "Can a beast weep in sorrow? Does darkness have the capacity to feel loneliness? I think not.

If you should ask me where I've been all this time I have to say "Things happen." I have to dwell on stones darkening the earth, on the river ruined in its own duration: I know nothing save things the birds have lost, the sea I left behind, or my sister crying. Why this abundance of places? Why does day lock with day? Why the dark night swilling round in our mouths? And why the dead?

Now I know that grief is a whetstone that sharpens all your love, all your happiest memories, into blades that tear you apart from within.