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

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

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

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.

We look and see what we see in a mirror, and we believe it. That's important, the question of belief. The question is: Should we believe what we see in a mirror?

When poems are no good they don't make any sense.

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.