Quotes from Georg Trakl

I drank the silence of God from a spring in the woods.

Silently, God opens his golden eyes over the place of skulls.

When we are thirsty, we drink the white waters of the pool, the sweetness of our mournful childhood.

Earlier lives drift by on silver soles, and the shadows of the damned descend into these sighing waters.

Black frost. The ground is hard, the air tastes bitter. Your stars cluster in evil signs.

For whoever is lonely there is a tavern.

The blue of my eyes is extinguished in this night, the red gold of my heart.

The guilt of newborns is immense.

I drank the silence of God from a spring in the woods.

I do not have easy days at home now and I drift between fear and helplessness in sunny rooms where it is unspeakably cold. Strange shudders of transformation, bodily experienced to the point of vulnerability, visions of mysteries until the certainty of having died, ecstasies to the point of stony petrifaction, and a continuation of dreaming sad dreams.

Your body is a hyacinth, Into which a monk dips his waxy fingers. Our silence is a black cavern, From which a soft animal steps at times And slowly lowers heavy eyelids. On your temples black dew drips, The last gold of expired stars

At the Moor Wanderer in the black wind; quietly the dry reeds whisper In the stillness of the moor. In the gray sky A flock of wild birds follows; Slanting over gloomy waters. Turmoil. In decayed hut The spirit of putrescence flutters with black wings. Crippled birches in the autumn wind. Evening in deserted tavern. The way home is scented all around By the soft gloom of grazing herds; Apparition of the night; toads plunge from brown waters.

In den einsamen Stunden des Geistes ist es schön in der Sonne zu gehn, an den gelben Mauern des Sommers hin

A world without fairy tales and myths would be as drab as life without music

Vom Schatten eines Hauchs geboren Wir wandeln in Verlassenheit Und sind im Ewigen verloren, Gleich Opfern unwissend, wozu sie geweiht.

A whore who with icy shudders gives birth to a small dead child.

Under ancient cypress trees, weeping dreams are harvested from sleep.

The thrush called strangeness into the sunset.

Purple cloud covered his head so that he silently attacked his own blood and likeness, a lunar countenance; stonily sank away into emptiness, when in a broken mirror a dying youth, the sister, appeared; the night engulfed the cursed race.

Shepherds buried the sun in the naked forest. With a net of hair A fisherman hauled the moon from the icy pond. The pale man dwells In a blue crystal, his cheek at rest against his stars, Or he bows his head in crimson sleep. But the black flight of birds always touches The watcher, the holiness of blue flowers; The nearby silence thinks forgotten things, extinguished angels. Again the brow turns night in moonlit stone; A radiant youth, The sister appears in autumn and black putrefaction.

The dark eagles, sleep and death, Rustle all night around my head: The golden statue of man Is swallowed by the icy comber Of eternity. On the frightening reef The purple remains go to pieces, And the dark voice mourns Over the sea. Sister in my wild despair Look, a precarious skiff is sinking Under the stars, The face of night whose voice is fading.

Not your dark poisons again, White sleep! This fantastically strange garden Of trees in deepening twilight Fills up with serpents, nightmoths, Spiders, bats. Approaching stranger! Your abandoned shadow In the red of evening Is a dark pirate ship Of the salty oceans of confusion. White birds from the outskirts of the night Flutter out over the shuddering cities Of steel.

Our silence is a black cavern.

On silver soles I climbed down the thorny stairs, and I walked into the white-washed room. A light burned there silently, and without speaking I wrapped my head in purple linen; and the earth threw out a childlike body, a creature of the moon, that slowly stepped out of the darkness of my shadow, with broken arms, stony waterfalls sank away, fluffy snow