Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.

The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don't work, I study the stars.

I know when dark-haired evening put on her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh, that there'd be no rest, there'd be no forgetting. Is like telling mourners round the graveside about resurrection, they want the dead back.

Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.

The English language is nobody's special property.