Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide sky.
— Rainer Maria Rilke from The Poet’s Guide to Life (trans. Ulrich Baer)
Artistic experience lies so incredibly close to that of sex, to its pain and its ecstasy, that the two manifestations are indeed but different forms of one and the same yearning and delight.
— Rainer Maria Rilke from Letters to a Young Poet