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graacier 's review for:
Letters to a Young Poet
by Rainer Maria Rilke
rec from beloved L ; will re-read.
fav line: “we have altered the way a house alters when a guest enters it.”
some more memorable lines –
- “When I have to see this lost, unreal woman who is connected with nothing, who cannot grow old, I feel how even as a child I struggled to get away from her and fear deep within me lest after years and years of running and walking I am still not far enough from her, that somewhere inwardly I still make movements that are the other half of her embittered gestures … Then I have a horror of her distraught pieties … herself empty as a dress, ghostly and terrible. And that still I am her child; that some scarcely recognizable wallpaper door in this faded wall that doesn’t belong to anything was my entrance into the world …!”
- “It belongs to becoming rather than being, to the unfinished rather than the completed. ”
- “There is nothing less apt to touch a work of art than critical words”
- “Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now.”
- “one day there will be girls and women whose name will no longer just signify the opposite of the male but something in their own right, something which does not make one think of any supplement or limit but only of life and existence: the female human being. This step forward (at first right against the will of the men who are left behind) will transform the experience of love, which is now full of error, alter it root and branch, reshape it into a relation between two human beings and no longer between man and woman. ”
- “we are in the middle of a transition where we cannot stand still. ”
- “We have no reason to be mistrustful of our world, for it is not against us. If it holds terrors they are our terrors, if it has its abysses these abysses belong to us, if there are dangers then we must try to love them.”
- “Do not watch yourself too closely. Do not draw over-rapid conclusions from what is happening to you. Simply let it happen. ”
- “You must be patient as an invalid and trusting as a convalescent, for you are perhaps both. And more than that: you are also the doctor responsible for looking after himself. ”
- “We should in general be very careful with names; it is so often the name of a crime which destroys a life, not the nameless and personal act itself, which was perhaps completely necessary to that life and could have been absorbed by it without difficulty.”
fav line: “we have altered the way a house alters when a guest enters it.”
some more memorable lines –
- “When I have to see this lost, unreal woman who is connected with nothing, who cannot grow old, I feel how even as a child I struggled to get away from her and fear deep within me lest after years and years of running and walking I am still not far enough from her, that somewhere inwardly I still make movements that are the other half of her embittered gestures … Then I have a horror of her distraught pieties … herself empty as a dress, ghostly and terrible. And that still I am her child; that some scarcely recognizable wallpaper door in this faded wall that doesn’t belong to anything was my entrance into the world …!”
- “It belongs to becoming rather than being, to the unfinished rather than the completed. ”
- “There is nothing less apt to touch a work of art than critical words”
- “Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now.”
- “one day there will be girls and women whose name will no longer just signify the opposite of the male but something in their own right, something which does not make one think of any supplement or limit but only of life and existence: the female human being. This step forward (at first right against the will of the men who are left behind) will transform the experience of love, which is now full of error, alter it root and branch, reshape it into a relation between two human beings and no longer between man and woman. ”
- “we are in the middle of a transition where we cannot stand still. ”
- “We have no reason to be mistrustful of our world, for it is not against us. If it holds terrors they are our terrors, if it has its abysses these abysses belong to us, if there are dangers then we must try to love them.”
- “Do not watch yourself too closely. Do not draw over-rapid conclusions from what is happening to you. Simply let it happen. ”
- “You must be patient as an invalid and trusting as a convalescent, for you are perhaps both. And more than that: you are also the doctor responsible for looking after himself. ”
- “We should in general be very careful with names; it is so often the name of a crime which destroys a life, not the nameless and personal act itself, which was perhaps completely necessary to that life and could have been absorbed by it without difficulty.”