Rainer Maria Rilke
343 citations

No, we don't accomplish our love in a single year as the flowers do; an immemorial sap flows up through our arms when we love. Dear girl, this: that we loved, inside us, not One who would someday appear, but seething multitudes; not just a single child, but also the fathers lying in our depths like fallen mountains; also the dried-up riverbeds of ancient mothers-;also the whole soundless landscape under the clouded or clear sky of its destiny -; all this, my dear, preceded you. ✨ 1923 Duinieser Elegien, no.3 (translated by Stephen Mitchell in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke,1989).

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Love

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