Americans are not brought up with meter. They're not brought up with poetry. If you try to get them to recite, they're too embarrassed.

For every poet it is always morning in the world; history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history.

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.

Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe. I don't think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.

The future happens. No matter how much we scream.

Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god.

The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

Start today like a new beginning, and not a repeat.

No one has the right to pee on your dreams!

You're an addiction...my obsession...

I treat all my projects the same. They're all time capsules of where I am at the time and what I'm thinking about.

Meanwhile, the Bush dynasty comes to an official end.

Unrivalled not only in its class, but in a class by itself.

Rebuilding our communities where the police and citizens all see themselves as being on the same side will require contributions from all of us.

[...]you don’t have to be Sun freakin Tzu to know that real fighting isn’t about killing or even hurting the other guy, it’s about scaring him enough to call it a day.

Those who hate you don't win unless you hate them back.

I'm lucky that I have such a hands on husband.