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.

I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style.

After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.

You're the little spoon, aren't you?

Each spice has a special day to it. For turmeric it is Sunday, when light drips fat and butter-colored into the bins to be soaked up glowing, when you pray to the nine planets for love and luck.

Money is no good unless it contributes something to the community, unless it builds a bridge to a better life. Any man can make money, but it takes a special kind of man to use it responsibly.

Rather than understand the original cause-a thought-we try to change the stressful feelings by looking outside ourselves.

My first holiday to San Francisco in 1998-99 was supposed to be a two-week vacation but I ended up staying five weeks and nearly didn't come home.

I don't have children, but I imagine if parents are really pushed on the subject, they probably have favorite children.

Consult the wisdom of your heart as well as your mind.

I saw this bloke chatting up a cheetah. He was trying to pull a fast one.

Keep in mind that God's sovereignty allows Him to even use that which is not cooperating with Him (the bad) in order to move things to where He wants them to go.