"Death is our friend, precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.
Angels often do now know whether they walk among the dead or living.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~
Photo by Ákos Szabó
Photo by Ian Turnell
Angels often do now know whether they walk among the dead or living.
More Rainer Maria Rilke quotes
"Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
"And when suddenlythe god stopped her and, with anguish in his cry,uttered the words: ‘He has turned round’ –she comprehended nothing and said softly: ...
"The free animalhas its dying always behind itand God in front of it, and its wayis the eternal way, as the spring flowing.Never, not for a moment, do ...
"If somewhere deep within me arises some essenceof having been a child, one I never experienced,perhaps the purest childness of my childhood,I don’t wa...
"Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor futurelessens . . . . Superabundant existencewells in my heart.
"Who shows a child, just as they are? Who sets itin its constellation, and gives the measureof distance into its hand? Who makes a child’s deathout of ...
"Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength ...
"O smile, going where? O upturned look:new, warm, receding surge of the heart--;alas, we are that surge. Does then the cosmic spacewe dissolve in taste...
"Every angel is terrifying.
"I beg you, 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...
"It wasn't his, it wasn't my fault,we both had nothing except patience,but Death has none. I saw him come (how meanly!)and I watched him as he took and...
"They all have tired mouthsand bright seamless souls.And a longing (as for sin)sometimes haunts their dreams.They are almost all alike; in God's garden...
"Who is there today who still cares about a well-finished death? No one. Even the rich, who could after all afford this luxury, are beginning to grow l...