I read; I travel; I become

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.

Months are different in college, especially freshman year. Too much happens. Every freshman month equals six regular months—they're like dog months.

Scrubbing the floor when no one else wanted to was something that my mother would have done. If I can't be with her, the least I can do is act like her sometimes.

The Night has a thousand eyes The Day but one Yet the light of the bright world dies With the dying sun.

Nobody's bought this land. And no one's going to want it either. It's dying land, lonely land.""Like me, then, " I said."Yes, like you." You chewed the corner of your lip. "You both need saving.

If I gave McClellan all the men he asked for, they could not find room to lie down; they'd have to sleep standing up.

Experience has shown that it is difficult, if not impossible, for a populous state to be run by good laws.

Everything good proceeds from enthusiasm.

I was always loud and obnoxious and giggly and funny.

When you write songs, you gotta be like a receiving station: you gotta be aware of what's going on around you. I never know what a song is going to be about before I write it.

Waking up from a dream of violence is much the same as waking up from a dream of love. You must go on living your life.