David Broussard Broussard

“Isn’t it time that, loving, we freed ourselves
from the beloved, and, trembling, endured:
as the arrow endures the bow, so as to be,
in its flight, something more than itself?”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“There is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.”
― Maya Angelou

“And so I check myself and swallow the luring call
of dark sobs. Alas, whom can we turn to
in our need? Not angels, not humans,
and the sly animals see at once
how little at home we are
in the interpreted world. That leaves us
some tree on a hillside, on which our eyes fasten
day after day; leaves us yesterday’s street
and the coddled loyalty of an old habit
that liked it here, stayed on, and never left.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

“It’s true enough, of course, no longer to live on earth is strange, to abandon customs barely mastered yet, not to interpret roses and other auspicious things, not give them meaning in a human future. No longer to be as we have always been, in those endlessly anxious hands – to leave even our name behind us as a child leaves off playing with a broken toy. Strange, no longer to know desires desired – strange to witness the involvement of all things lost suddenly, each drifting away singly into space. And truly, to be dead is hard, so full of making up lost ground, till little by little we find a trace of eternity. Yet, the living are wrong to draw such distinctions so clearly: angels (it is said) are often never quite sure whether they pass among the living or the dead,”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies