A Writer's Stand

     But do not imagine I am suffering disappointments here — quite the contrary. I marvel sometimes how readily I give up everything I expected for the reality, even when the reality is bad.
     My God, if any of it could be shared! But would it be then, would it be? No, it is only at the price of solitude.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Briggs, M. D. Herter Norton (tr.), p. 68.

....I was disquieted also, as I recollect, lest, since nothing had been provided for any fixed time, one might miss many things altogether. And so when I returned to Ulsgaard and saw all the books, I set to; in great haste, almost with a bad conscience. Of what I so often felt later, I now somewhat had a premonition: that one had no right to open a book at all, unless one pledged oneself to read them all. With every line one broke off a bit of the world. Before books it was intact and perhaps it would be again after them. But how could I, who was unable to read, cope with them all? There they stood, even in that modest library, in such hopeless abundance and solidarity. I flung myself stubborn and despairing from book to book and battled through their pages, like one who has to perform a disproportionate task.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Ibid., pp.171-172.

     I know that if I am destined for the worst it will avail me nothing to disguise myself in my better clothes.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Ibid., p. 181.

     For glory is but an instant, and we have never seen anything more lasting than misery.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Ibid., p. 182

Outside much has changed. I don't know how. But inside and before you, O my God, inside before you, spectator, are we not without action? We discover, indeed, that we do not know our part, we look for a mirror, we want to rub off the make-up and remove the counterfeit and be real. But somewhere a bit of mummery still sticks to us that we forget. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows, we do not notice that the corners of our lips are twisted. And thus we go about, a laughing-stock, a mere half-thing: neither existing, nor actors.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Ibid., p. 194.

....he notices a plate with fruit on the window-seat. Involuntarily he takes an apple from it, and lays it before him on the table. How my life stands round about this fruit, he thinks. Around all that is finished that which has still to be done rises and takes increase.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Ibid., p. 202.

     (To be loved means to be consumed. To love is to give light with inexhaustible oil. To be loved is to pass away, to love is to endure.)
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Ibid., p. 209.