- I don’t teach writing. I teach patience. Toughness. Stubborness. The willingness to fail. I teach the life. The odd thing is most of the things that stop an inexperienced writer are so far from the truth as to be nearly beside the point. When you feel global doubt about your talent, that is your talent. People who have no talent don’t have any doubt. –Richard Bausch, from Off the Page: Writers Talk About Beginnings, Endings, and Everything in Between
- Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. –Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet
- There are thoughts which are prayers. There are moments when, whatever the posture of the body, the soul is on its knees. –Victor Hugo
- It’s possible, I’m moving through the hard veins of heavy mountains, like an arc, alone; I’m so deep inside, I see no end in sight, and no distance: everything is getting near and everything near is turning to stone. –Rilke
- Watching the moon at midnight, solitary, mid-sky, I knew myself completely, no part left out. -Izumi Shikubu
- A man can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days. -Goethe
- …the longer I live, the more necessary it seems to me to endure, to copy the whole dictation of existence to the end, for it might be that only the last sentence contains that small, perhaps inconspicuous word through which all laboriously learned and not understood orients itself toward glorious sense. –Rilke
- In the love of narrow souls I make many short voyages but in vain–I find no sea room—but in great souls I sail before the wind without a watch, and never reach the shore. –Thoreau
- Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope. –Edith Wharton
- I have patience for centuries in me and will live as though my time were very big. –Rilke
- It’s with bad sentiments that one makes good novels. –Aldous Huxley
- A mountain keeps an echo deep inside itself. That’s how I hold your voice. –Rumi
- Comfort me from wherever you are–alone, we are quickly worn out; if I place my head on the road, let it seem softened by you. Could it be that even from afar we offer each other a gentle breath? –Rainer Marie Rilke, Comfort Me
- It is the stars as not yet known to science that I would know, the stars which the lonely traveler knows. –Thoreau
- Life isn’t one damn thing after another. It’s the same damn thing again and again. –Edna St. Vincent Millay
- For identities that are perhaps a bit lonely, a bit anxious at the thought of the world, this could be the place to hinge a life. –Allen Jones on Ingomar, Montana
- Look, we don’t love like flowers with only one season behind us; when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms. –Rilke
- Patience, n: A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue. –Ambrose Bierce, from The Devil’s Dictionary
- There is a fraternity of us, the abyss walkers. In our eyes, the world is divided by it, made up of those who walk frail, careening rope bridges over the abysses and those who do not. We know each other. I do not think it is a conscious thing with us, this knowing, at least not most of the time, or we would flee from each other as from monsters. It is an animal thing. It is only on that wild old neck-prickling level that we meet. It is only in our eyes that we acknowledge that our twin exhalations have touched and mingled. Sometimes, though not often, one of the others, the non-abyss people, will know us too. You may even know the feeling yourself; you may have met someone about whom otherness clings like miasma; you can feel it on your skin though you can’t name it. When that happens, you have me one of us. You may even be one of us, down deep and in secret. The other half of the world, the solid, golden half, the non-abyssers…they feel nothing under their feet but solidity. They inherit the earth. We inherit the wind. –from Outer Banks by Anne Rivers Siddons
- But your solitude will be a support and a home for you, even in the midst of very unfamiliar circumstances, and from it you will find all your paths. –Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Stephen Mitchell
- “My loving friend, you see, my life was never given a foundation, no one was able to imagine what it would want to become. In Venice there stands the so-called Ca del Duca, a princely foundation, on which later the most wretched tenement came to be built. With me it’s the opposite: the beautiful arched elevations of my spirit rest on the most tentative beginning; a wooden scaffolding, a few boards….Is that why I feel inhibited in raising the nave, the tower to which the weight of the great bells is to be hoisted (by angels, who else could do it)?” –Rilke, writing to Magda von Hattingberg on February 8, 1914
- I am tomorrow or some future day what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day. –James Joyce
- We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well…How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless. –Paul Bowles, American writer
