We look and see what we see in a mirror, and we believe it. That's important, the question of belief. The question is: Should we believe what we see in a mirror?

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.

To think what is true, to sense what is beautiful and to want what is good, hereby the spirit finds purpose of a life in reason.

The only place you can win a football game is on the field. The only place you can lose it is in your heart.

If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills, you're out of your mind. There are more kicks to be had in a good case of paralytic polio or by living in an iron lung.

While there is an attempt by the Trump people to say that California isn't really America. California certainly seems like America to me.

If you're not willing to give up everything for Christ, are you willing to be made willing?

In the same way that we need statesmen to spare us the abjection of exercising power, we need scholars to spare us the abjection of learning.

Don't give up. Don't ever give up.

Some women are like elephants. I don't mean size, I mean they never forget.

Flying without feathers is not easy: my wings have no feathers.

I love black because it affirms, designs and styles. A woman in a black dress is a pencil stroke.