Rainer Maria Rilke Quotes

From daydreams on the road there was no waking. He plodded on. He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

Memory is not what the heart desires.

Ah, tell me not that memory sheds gladness o'er the past, what is recalled by faded flowers, save that they did not last?

Sharp nostalgia, infinite and terrible, for what I already possess.

I shall go the way of the open sea, to the lands I knew before you came, and the cool ocean breezes shall blow from me the memory of your name.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

The punctuation of anniversaries is terrible, like the closing of doors, one after another between you and what you want to hold on to.

God, I wish you could have been there.

Everything inside me screams for just one more kiss, one more word, one more glance, one more.

Desire makes everything blossom; possession makes everything wither and fade.

No magic. I do believe you might have taken it all with you when you went away.

She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.

And her life will perhaps be the richer, for holding now within it the memory of what came, but could not stay.

How those fires burned that are no longer, how the weather worsened, how the shadow of the seagull vanished without a trace. Was it the end of a season, the end of a life? Was it so long ago it seems it might never have been? What is it in us that lives in the past and longs for the future, or lives in the future and longs for the past? (from "No Words Can Describe It")

There's no ifs and buts or maybes, you're gonna miss, you're gonna miss my loving.

I didn't know the names of the flowers - now my garden is gone.

What we have never had, remains; It is the things we have that go.

Of one thing alone I am very sure: it is a law of our nature that the memory of longing should survive the more fugitive memory of fulfillment.

I did not grow up in poverty. But I did grow up with a poor boy's sense of longing, in my case not for what my family had never had, but for what we had had and lost.

Memory is the sense of loss, and loss pulls us after it.

The years as they pass plunder us of one thing after another.

Some of these days, Oh, you'll miss me honey

To gain anything we have longed for is only to discover how vain and empty it is; and even though we are always living in expectation of better things, at the same time we often repent and long to have the past back again.

The whole world can't lick us but we can lick ourselves by longing too hard for things we haven't got any more - and by remembering too much.