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

The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves . . .

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.

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.

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.

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

In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.