Author: Rainer Maria Rilke

Cited by

• C. Dale Young (1)
  • IN: The Halo (2016) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich. (Every angel is terrifying.)
    FROM: Duino Elegies, (1923), Poem, Bohemia
• Michael Cunningham (1)
  • IN: By Nightfall (2010) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
    FROM: Duino Elegies, (1923), Poem, Austria
• Philip Pullman (1)
  • IN: The Amber Spyglass (2000) Fiction, Fantastical Fiction, British
    EPIGRAPH: O stars, isn't it from your that the lover's desire for the face of his beloved arises? Doesn't his secret insight into her pure features come from the pure constellations?
    FROM: The Third Duino Elegy, (1923), Poem, Bohemia
• Stephen Vizinczey (1)
  • IN: In Praise of Older Women (1986) Fiction, NULL
    EPIGRAPH: Woher dein Recht, in jeglichem Kostume, In jeder Maske wahr zu sein? - Ich ruhme.
    FROM: O Sage, Dichter, (1921), Poem, Bohemia
• Hugh Maclennan (1)
  • IN: Two Solitudes (1945) Fiction, NULL
    EPIGRAPH: Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect, and touch, and greet each other.
    FROM: Letters to a Young Poet, (1929), Book, Bohemia/Austria
• Ben Okri (1)
  • IN: Dangerous Love (1996) Fiction, NULL
    EPIGRAPH: Shouldn't these ancient sufferings of ours finally start to bear fruit?
    FROM: The First Elegy from Duino Elegies, (1923), Poem, Bohemia-Austria
• Jennifer Banash (1)
  • IN: Silent Alarm (2015) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Come into the candlelight. I'm not afraid to look the dead in the face.
    FROM: Requiem For a Friend, (1909), NULL, Bohemia/Austria
• Mark Frost (1)
  • IN: Alliance (2014) Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: I live my life in growing orbits Which move out over the things of the world. Perhaps I can never achieve the last, But that will be my attempt. I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, And I have been circling for a thousand years, And I still don't know if I'm a falcon, or a storm, Or a great song.
    FROM: I Live my Life in Growing Orbit, (1905), Poem, Czech Republic
• Zoraida Córdova (1)
  • IN: The Vast and Brutal Sea (2014) Fantasy, Young Adult Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: And if the earthly no longer knows your name, / Whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing. / To the flashing water say: I am.
    FROM: Silent Friend of Many Distances, Feel, (1907), Poem, Czech Republic/Switzerland
• Dianne Wolfer (1)
  • IN: The Shark Caller (2016) Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, Australian
    EPIGRAPH: We need in love to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.
    FROM: Requiem for a Friend, (1909), Poem, Czech Republic
• Melissa de la Cruz (1)
  • IN: Bloody Valentine (2010) Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves.
    FROM: Letters to a Young Poet, (1929), Book, Germany
• Arango Sascha (1)
  • IN: The Truth and Other Lies (2014) Fiction, German
    EPIGRAPH: Perhaps deep down all horror is helplessness that wants help from us
    FROM: Letters to a Young Poet, (1929), Book, Switzerland
• Joy Preble (1)
  • IN: Anastasia Forever (2012) Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Again and again the two of us walk out together Under the ancient trees, lie down again and again Among the flowers, face to face with the sky.
    FROM: Again and Again, (1914), Poem, Czech Republic
• Allan Wolf (1)
  • IN: Who Killed Christopher Goodman? (2017) Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Your resonance lingered in lions and rocks and in the trees and birds. There you are singing still.
    FROM: Sonnets to Orpheus, (1923), Lyric, Czech Republic
• Amanda Downum (1)
  • IN: Dreams of Shreds and Tatters (2015) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Every Angel is terrible.
    FROM: The Duino Elegies, (1923), Poem, Bohemia/Austria
• Kate (edited by) Bernheimer (1)
  • IN: xo Orpheus: Fifty New Myths (2013) Fiction, Anthology, American
    EPIGRAPH: What is the deepest loss that you have suffered? If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.
    FROM: Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29, (1923), NULL, Czech Republic
• David Savill (1)
  • IN: They Are Trying to Break Your Heart (2016) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Losing too is still ours.
    FROM: For Hans Carossa, (1924), Poem, Bohemia/Austria
• William Styron (2)
  • IN: Sophie's Choice (1979) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Who'll show a child just as it is? Who'll place it within its constellation, with the measure of distance in its hand? Who'll make its death from grey beard, that grows hard, -- or leave it there, within the round mouth, like the choking core of a sweet apple? ... Minds of murderers are easily divined. But his, though, death, the whole of death, -- even before life's begun, to hold it all so gently, and be good: this is beyond description! ... I seek that essential region of the soul where absolute evil confronts brotherhood.
    FROM: Von der vierten Duineser Elegie, (1923), NULL, Bohemia/Austria
• Mary Sojourner (1)
  • IN: 29 (2014) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Again and again Some people in the crowd wake up, They have no ground in the crowd And they emerge according to broader laws, They carry strange customs with them, And demand room for bold gestures. The future speaks ruthlessly though them.
    FROM: Über Kunst, (1898), Essay, Bohemia/Austria
• Brittani Sonnenberg (1)
  • IN: Home Leave (2014) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened, like winter, which even now is passing. For beneath the winter is a winter so endless that to survive it all is a triumph of the heart.
    FROM: Sonnets to Orpheus, (1923), Poem, Bohemia/Austria
• Kyle Minor (1)
  • IN: Praying Drunk (None) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: If I lose my demons, I will lose my angels as well.
    FROM: NULL, (None), [NA], Bohemia/Austria
• Stephen Policoff (1)
  • IN: Beautiful Somewhere Else (2004) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Who has turned us around this way, so that no matter what we do, we look as though we're leaving? Like someone standing for the last time on the last hill from which he can view his whole valley -- the way he turns, stops, lingers -- this is the way we live, forever leaving.
    FROM: Duino Elegies, (1923), Poem, Bohemia/Austria
• Derek Palacio (1)
  • IN: Mortifications (2016) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: I have an interior that I never knew of. Everything passes into ti now. I don't know what happens there.
    FROM: The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, (1910), Book, Bohemia/Austria
• Dinaw Mengestu (1)
  • IN: How to Read the Air (2010) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: You still don't understand? Throw the emptiness in your arms out into that space we breathe; maybe birds will feel the air thinning as they fly deeper into themselves.
    FROM: Duino Elegies, (1923), Poem, Bohemia/Austria
• Peter Temple (1)
  • IN: Truth (2009) Fiction, NULL
    EPIGRAPH: ‘But because truly, being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.’
    FROM: Ninth Elegy, (1923), Poem, Bohemia/Austria
• John Lawton (1)
  • IN: Then We Take Berlin (2013) Fiction, British
    EPIGRAPH: Wer spricht von Seigen> Uberstehen ist Alles.
    FROM: Requiem, fur Wolf Graf von Kalckreuth, (1908), NULL, Bohemia/Austria
• Joseph Kertes (1)
  • IN: The Afterlife of Stars (2014) Fiction, NULL
    EPIGRAPH: Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too.
    FROM: NULL, (1922), NULL, Czech-Republic
• Mia Gallagher (1)
  • IN: Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland (2016) Fiction, Irish
    EPIGRAPH: Ich habe Tote, und ich lief sie hin und war erstaunt, sie so getrost zu sehn, so rasch zuhaus im Totsein, so gerecht, so anders als ihr Ruf. Nur Du, Du kehrst zurück; Du streifst mich, Du gehst um, Du willst an etwas stofen, daf es klingt von Dir und Dich verrät... Was bittest Du? Sag, soll ich reisen? Hast Du irgendwo ein Ding zurückgelassen, das sich quält und das Dir nachwill?... Bist Du noch da? In welcher Ecke bist Du? I have my dead, and I let them go and was astonished to see them so content, so at home in their deadness, so cheerful, so different to their reputation. Only you, you return; you brush past me, you hang around, you try to knock on things so they sound of you, betraying your presence... What do you want? Tell me: should I set off on a journey? Have you left a Thing behind somewhere, that torments itself, longs to have you back?... Are you still here? What corner are you standing in?
    FROM: Requiem for a Friend, (1908), NULL, Austria/Czech
• De Robertis, Carolina (1)
  • IN: The Gods of Tango (2015) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: And all things conspire to keep silent about us, half out of shame perhaps, half as unutterable hope.
    FROM: Second Elegy, (1923), Poem, Bohemia/Austria
• Sonya Chung (1)
  • IN: Long for This World (2010) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: I want to unfold. I don't want to stay folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
    FROM: I am Too Alone in the World, (1905), Poem, Bohemia/Austria
• Richard Flanagan (1)
  • IN: Death of a River Guide (1994) Fiction, Australian
    EPIGRAPH: That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called 'visions', the whole so-called 'spirit-world', death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out by life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.
    FROM: Letter to Franz Kappus, (1904), Letter, Czech Republic
• Chaim Potok (1)
  • IN: The Gift of Asher Lev (1990) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Surely all art is the result of having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.
    FROM: Letter to his wife, (1907), Letter, Czech Republic
• Cornelia Funke (1)
  • IN: Inkdeath (2007) Fiction, Young Adult, German
    EPIGRAPH: Hark, the footsteps of the night, Fade in silence long. Quiet chirps my reading light Like a cricket's song. Books inviting us to read On the bookshelves stand. Piers for bridges that will lead Into fairyland.
    FROM: "Vigils III", Sacrifice to the Lares, (1895), Poem, Austria
• Richard Skinner (1)
  • IN: The Red Dancer (2001) Fiction, British
    EPIGRAPH: The story of a shattered life can only be told in bits and pieces.
    FROM: NULL, (None), NULL, Bohemia/Austria
• Maggie Stiefvater (2)
  • IN: Forever (2011) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: Oh, the ball that's thrown, the ball that dared, Does it not fill your hands differently when it returns: made weightier, merely by coming home.
    FROM: NULL, (None), NULL, Bohemia/Austria
• Camron Wright (1)
  • IN: Clara Callan (2002) Fiction, American
    EPIGRAPH: And if the worldly forget you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the swift water say: I am.
    FROM: The Sonnets to Orpheus, (1923), Lyric, Bohemia/Austria