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.

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

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.

You can't write drunk.

There's always more to see.

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

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