Letters To Milena Quotes
"Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts."
"One can tell you the truth like no one else."
"The easy possibility of writing letters must have brought wrack and ruin to the souls of the world."
"One letter corroborates another and can refer to it as witness."
"Always M. or not M.—but a principle, a light in the darkness!"
"As long as we must place our fingers in the wounds, we have the right to convince ourselves the wounds exist, and that they are deep."
"I hardly slept myself, but two things consoled me."
"So I’m expecting one of two things. Either continued silence, which means: 'Don’t worry, I’m fine.' Or else a few lines."
"I am spiritually ill, my lung disease is nothing but an overflowing of my spiritual disease."
"It's like trying to smash a single cauldron in hell; first, the enterprise won’t succeed, and second, if it does succeed, one will be consumed by the glowing effluent, while hell remains intact in all its glory."
"In any case the first thing is to lie down in a garden and extract as much sweetness as possible from the ailment."
"Sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty."
"I’m saving everything else for tomorrow, including my thanks."
"For if it ever comes to a trial there will be no further investigations; they will simply establish the fact: he robbed her of her sleep."
"It’s the kind of worry I’d have if you were here under my supervision."
"I am unable to read them and naturally I read them anyway, the way an animal dying of thirst drinks, and with that comes fear and more fear."
"Your courage, however, indicates an advance, hence a decrease in pressure, hence an increase in courage."
"The peaceful letters are the ones that make me happy."
"I could sit at the feet of these letters, happy beyond measure; they bring rain on my burning head."
"It’s difficult to tell the truth, since there is only one truth, but that truth is alive and therefore has a lively, changing face."
"My beloved is a fiery column passing over the earth. Now it is holding me enclosed. But it does not guide those who are enclosed, just those who see."
"The only thing I do fear—and I fear this with my eyes wide open, I am drowning in this fear, helpless."
"You only think it is terribly long and that many things could still happen along the way."
"Despite all this, we will not abandon you, even in your moments of greatest folly, least of all then."
"I am not fighting your husband for you, this fight exists only within yourself."
"Life was good, peaceful, its only unease was hope. Do you know a better one?"
"There is everything that can bring forth life from within; in short, there's some of the air breathed in Paradise before the Fall."
"I love you, you dimwit, my love engulfs you the way the sea loves a tiny pebble on its bed."
"I love the whole world, and that includes your left shoulder—no, the right one was first."
"Away with it; it makes me dreadfully afraid."
"Following this realization, I have renounced all other life."
"I felt more worthy of you, admittedly only by a tiny bit, but nevertheless a tiny bit more worthy."
"This is why I'm so grateful (to you and to everything), and so it's 'natural' I am extremely calm and extremely uncalm, extremely constrained and extremely free whenever I'm next to you."
"My ambition, however, was unsatisfied, I had wanted to burn the letters myself and scatter the ashes over the Belvedere."
"I am dirty, Milena, infinitely dirty, this is why I scream so much about purity. No one sings as purely as those who inhabit the deepest hell."
"Every sentence, every word, every—if I may say so—music in that story is connected with the 'fear.'"
"You are the knife I turn inside myself, this is love."
"I was living off your gaze. I wasn't standing on solid ground, and this is what I feared so much."
"I am living in my dirt, that's my business. But dragging you down into it is an entirely different matter, not only as a transgression against you, that's incidental."
"Perhaps their strength to love consists solely in their ability to be loved."
"The thought of death makes you anxious? I'm just terribly afraid of pain. That's a bad sign. To want death but not pain is a bad sign."
"Few things are certain, but one is that we’ll never live together, share an apartment, body to body, at a common table, never, not even in the same city."
"I have spent my life fighting the desire to end it."
"Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts and by no means just with the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing."
"Written kisses never arrive at their destination; the ghosts drink them up along the way."
"How did people ever get the idea they could communicate with one another by letter! One can think about someone far away and one can hold on to someone nearby; everything else is beyond human power."
"The only good reason for two people to get married is if it is impossible for them not to."
"What lies deep down is deceiving; but you can know a person by the surface."
"If there’s anything that avenges itself in this world, it is calculation and accounting in spiritual affairs."
"Why do they demand from others more than they are able to give themselves?"
"Living together is not only easier, but also harder than living alone."
"The greatest promise that husband and wife can give each other is that deep statement made, smiling, to children: I won’t let you go."
"Happiness! As if being happy depended on us and us alone!"
"You can beat someone else until he can hardly breathe, and no sooner does he see a bunch of carrots, dripping with dew and fresh—bright carrots with green leaves—and he’s already happy."