How can I turn from Africa and live?

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.

If you believe you can, you can achieve your dreams.

Don't try to create the world in your image-that was God's mistake.

There surely is in human nature an inherent propensity to extract all the good out of all the evil.

The United States has put more money on HIV, AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis than any country in the world and it's having an impact real quick.

The capitalist class shoots down mothers and children. It stops at nothing, no matter how monstrous, to prevent the organization of the workers.

The message we have internalized is clear - we are what we do and what we own, not what we are inside ourselves. Where it counts!

I am only doing now what I have ever done; and ever will continue to do - that is adapting past experience to present reform in the light of high ideals and future objects.

Every library is an arsenal.

I feel that as the world becomes more and more multicultural, it's a good tool to be able to speak another language.

Passion kept one fully in the present, so that time became a series of mutually exclusive 'nows.'