Living the Question

Quotes I like lately, not for their relevance so much as for their prose.

"Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of the lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it."

-Pablo Neruda

"Why sadder but wiser? Why not happier and wiser? What else could wisdom be? She drank coffee black. She would not fall apart."

-Annie Dillard

"Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day."

-Rainier Maria Rilke