Great Falls, VA

*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to break out of it.  This very wish will help you, if you use it quietly, and deliberately and like a tool, to spread out your solitude over wide country.  People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition.  We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult is a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.           

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Translation by M.D. Herter Norton

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