Rex’s Reviews > Letters to a Young Poet > Status Update

Don't be confused by surfaces; in the depths everything becomes law."

"…for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world's sounds— wouldn't you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attention to it."

"Things aren't so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable , they happen in the space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life."

“All feelings that concentrate you and lift you up are pure; only that feeling is impure which grasps just one side of your being and thus distorts you. Everything you can think of as you face your childhood, is good. Everything that makes more of you than you have ever been, even in your best hours, is right.”

“Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.”

“Don’t think that the person who is trying to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes give you pleasure. His life has much trouble and sadness, and remains far behind yours. If it were otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words.”

“You must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like someone who is recovering; for perhaps you are both.”

“But only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.”

“This is in the end the only kind of courage that is required of us: the courage to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that can meet us. The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life.”

“The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise.”