"The grave is not the end. From the graves of those we love most and where, with those we love most, are buried all our selfish drives and desires, w… - Lou Andreas-Salomé

The more fully we enter into the 'challenge of the hour', into the present factual moment, into the conditions that hold from one case to another, instead of being trammeled by prescriptions and directives (written by human beings!), the more connectedly do we act in accord with the whole . . . If anyone thinks that is immorally presumptuous and high-handed, then it would be truer to call the childish-slavish obedience to prescriptions, which make everything easy, a convenient moral slovenliness!

"But this danger you mention?" he went on. "Tell me, where is there beauty that isn't at the same time in danger? -- and when wasn't the greatest beauty also the greatest danger! -- And mind you: this know-it-all attitude and drive to control, the 'firm hand' you were talking about -- all that arrogance, especially of the usual, masculine kind, will go to pieces trying to deal with this! That approach is only best right from the start and with women who are no threat to anyone. But -- please tell me -- what's so great about a manly stance that has to look out for itself, that's so anxiously self-defensive?" -- Marcus, p. 180

[On receiving the newly completed Sixth, Eighth and Tenth Duino Elegies] Ah слава Богу [Russian for thank God] dear Rainer, how rich his gift to you -- and yours to me! I sat and read and cried from joy, and it was not just joy at all but something much more powerful, as if a curtain were being parted, rent, and everything were growing quiet and certain and present and good. I remember as if it were today how much the beginning of the last Elegy plagued you, and when it had shaken me so severely, how even that plagued you; it has been on your lips for such long years; a word which one cannot make conscious and which is there all the same; in the beginning was this word. And then the Creature Elegy [the Eighth]! -- It is the poem of my most secret heart, oh so sayably glorious; and said, the inexpressible made present and actual. And that, finally is the message of this poetry: that we are surrounded, ringed by things of mute presence that are being rescued, redeemed into existence for us only thus, and yet it is these things alone by which we live. (p. 332-33)