Lou Andreas Salome Quotes

Poetry is something in-between the dream and its interpretation.

Should we not be moved rather than chilled by the knowledge that he might have attained his greatness only through his frailties?

Believe me, the world won't give you any gifts. If you want to have a life, steal it.

I don't invent you at sadly cooled-off places from which you've gone away; even your not being there is warm with you and more real and more than a privation. Longing leads out too often into vagueness. Why should I cast myself, when, for all I know, your influence falls on me, gently, like moonlight on a window seat.

Conflicted creatures, that’s what we [parents] are — we give birth, without knowing to what; we educate, without knowing whom; we must answer for it, without knowing how; and we can give up neither our power nor our fear.

Songs of longing! And they will resound in my letters, just as they always have, sometimes loudly and sometimes secretly so that you alone can hear them… But they will also be different — different from how they used to be, these songs. For I have turned and found longing at my side, and I have looked into her eyes, and now she leads me with a steady hand.” ―from a letter to Lou Andreas-Salome

I am going to tell a story: Once Upon A Time there was a man and a woman. The man and the woman were dreaming. The man and the woman dreamed each other and when they finished dreaming they had invented each other. So I am going to tell the story of a dream: Once upon a time there was a couple: the ideal couple, the perfect couple, the archetypal couple, who would combine in their two faces the features of all the lovers of history, all those who might have been able to fall in love with each other, all those ever imagined by the poets, and all those unimagined yet. They were (or would be) Abelard and Héloïse, Venus and Tannhäuser, Hamlet and Ophelia, Agathe and Ulrich, Solomon and the Shulamite maiden, the Consul and Yvonne, Daphnis and Chloe, Percy and Mary Shelley, the narrator and Albertine, Jocasta and Oedipus, Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat, Pygmalion and Galatea, Othello and Desdemona, Penelope and Ulysses, Baudelaire and Jeanne Duval, Laura and Petrarch, Humbert Humbert and Lolita, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Alonso Quijano and Dulcinea, Leda and the Swan, Adam and Eve, Wagner and Cosima, Pelléas and Mélisande, Cleopatra and Mark Antony, Calisto and Melibea, Faust and Gretchen, Orpheus and Eurydice, Romeo and Juliet, Heathcliff and Cathy, Tristan and Isolde, Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salome, Jason and Medea, Miranda and Ferdinand, Kafka and Milena, Electra and Agamemnon, Don Juan and Thisbe, von Aschenbach and Tadzio, Poe and Annabel Lee, Borges and Matilde Urbach. As the curtain rises they are kissing each other passionately in the middle of a steamy, shadowed park, underneath the pines. Is this not perhaps the ideal beginning of any love story? Not to forget that there is also a unicorn, a tree laden with garnet-colored fruit, and a large neon sign hanging above them both that reads: A Mon Suel Desir. If we look carefully we will notice that the park is surrounded by water on all sides—that is, this is an island. The story might well begin at any moment.