If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.

The line expresses a characteristically Rilkean ambivalence toward inner turmoil: what we call “devils” (anxieties, compulsions, darkness, suffering) may be entwined with the very forces that make us alive and creative—our “angels” (inspiration, intensity, vision). The speaker fears that curing or banishing the painful parts of the psyche could also flatten the soul’s heights, leaving a safer but diminished self. It resonates with modern psychological insight that symptoms can be bound up with identity and talent, and with Rilke’s broader insistence on “living the questions” rather than prematurely resolving them. The quote thus frames suffering not as good in itself, but as potentially inseparable from one’s deepest capacities.