Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.

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.

An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them.

The attitude of others towards you is the reflection of their state of mind.

Being cool is being your own self, not doing something that someone else is telling you to do. Just be bold, be brave enough to be your true self. In short, be yourself, but always your better self.

I began to see during the civil war, in that part of the states of Missouri and Kansas where the doctors were shut out, the children did not die.

If in the after life there is not music, we will have to import it.

If you were to destroy the belief in immortality in mankind, not only love but every living force on which the continuation of all life in the world depended, would dry up at once.

My partner is a Frenchman, so I have got to smell right.

There's nothing deader than a dead love.

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.

Every man gets an opportunity once in a lifetime.