The heart hid still in the dark, hard as the Philosopher's Stone.

Wherever one went the world was blooming. And yet despair gave birth to poetry.

The poem is born dark; it comes, as the result of a radical individuation, into the world as a language fragment, thus, as far as language manages to be world, freighted with world.

Illegibility of this world. All things twice over. The strong clocks justify the splitting hour, hoarsely. You, clamped into your deepest part, climb out of yourself for ever.

Tall poplars – human beings of this earth!

What times are these when a conversation is almost a crime because it includes so much made explicit?

Schwerer werden. Leichter sein.

Each arrow you shoot off carries its own target into the decidedly secret tangle.

There’s nothing in the world for which a poet will give up writing, not even he is a Jew and the language of his poems is German.

Don’t sign your name between worlds, surmount the manifold of meanings, trust the tearstain, learn to live.