You do know that you are in a period of transition and wish for nothing as much as to transform yourself. If some aspect of your life is not well, then consider the illness to be the means for an organism to free itself from something foreign to it. In that case you must help it to be ill and to have its whole illness, to let it break out. That is the course of its progress.—Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke, circa 1900; photo via Wikipedia Commons

• This quote comes from my favorite edition of Letters to a Young Poet, translated by Joan M. Burnham, published by New World Library, available here.
• Read a biography of Rilke at the Poetry Foundation.
• You’ll also find links to poems by Rilke and articles about him at the Poetry Foundation.

See more quotes about writing here.

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