Isn't love thousandfold? Isn't it like the sun that shines on everything? Must love be stingy? Must love give everything to one person and take from the others... I don't know much about the two of you [Rilke and Clara]; but it seems to me that you have shed too much of your old self and spread it out like a cloak so that your king [Rilke] can walk on it. I wish for your sake and for the world and for art [Clara is sculptress] and also for my sake that you would wear your own golden cape again..

In a letter to her friend, the sculptress Clara Rilke-Westhoff, Worpswede, 13 May 1901; as quoted in 'Voicing our visions, – Writings by women artists'; ed. Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York, 1991, p. 202