So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever known, if a restiveness, like light and cloud shadow passes over your hands and over all that you do.  You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.

Here, where I am surrounded by an enormous landscape, which the winds move across as they come from the seas, here I feel that there is no one anywhere who can answer for you those questions and feelings which, in their depths, have a life of their own; for even the most articulate people are unable to help, since what words point to is so very delicate, is almost unsayable. But even so, I think that you will not have to remain without a solution if you trust in Things that are like the ones my eyes are now resting upon. If you trust in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples - those myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses.  Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses, only waiting to see us, once beautiful and brave.  Perhaps everything terrible in our lives is, in its deepest being, something helpless, that wants help from us.

You life will find its own paths... and that they be good, rich, and wide is what I wish for you, more than I can say.

Irony: Don't let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments.

Of all my books, I find only a few indispensible.

Everything is gestation and then birthing.

The artist's experience lies so unbelievably close to the sexual, to its pain and its pleasure, that the two phenomena are really just different forms of one and the same longing and bliss.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as criticism.

I have left a letter from you unanswered for a long time; not because I had forgotten it - on the contrary: it is the kind that one reads again when one finds it among other letters, and I recognize you in it as if you were very near.