All of Victorian verse is pentameter.

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.

Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life.

Verbalize someone's actions back to them. Menace them with language, the language mirror. Death by feedback.

Less time on trivialities that will mean nothing when you're old. In the end all that will matter is who you helped and how deeply you cared

Passion and prejudice govern the world only under the name of reason.

Once you let go of your morals, everything becomes funny

Watching 'The Sound of Music' is like being beaten to death by a Hallmark card.

The unlettered man who prayed to his maker would be heard; the pedant reciting a faultless invocation would be ignored.

May you know the beauty of your own true nature.

I am disappointed with myself. I am disappointed not so much with the particular things I have done as with the aspects of who I have become. I have a nagging sense that all is not as it should be.

A man who invents himself needs someone to believe in him... Not only the need to be believed in, but the need to believe in another. You've got it: Love.