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.

Love After Love 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, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.

The poem is itself a mirror.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

There's always more to see.

The truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element.