The only things that the United States has given to the world are skyscrapers, jazz, and cocktails. That is all. And in Cuba, in our America, they make much better cocktails.

The terrible, cold, cruel part is Wall Street. Rivers of gold flow there from all over the earth, and death comes with it. There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit: herds of men who cannot count past three, herds more who cannot get past six, scorn for pure science and demoniacal respect for the present. And the terrible thing is that the crowd that fills the street believes that the world will always be the same and that it is their duty to keep that huge machine running, day and night, forever.

Hour of Stars (1920) The round silence of night, one note on the stave of the infinite. Ripe with lost poems, I step naked into the street. The blackness riddled by the singing of crickets: sound, that dead will-o'-the-wisp, that musical light perceived by the spirit. A thousand butterfly skeletons sleep within my walls. A wild crowd of young breezes over the river.

The night below. We two. Crystal of pain. You wept over great distances. My ache was a clutch of agonies over your sickly heart of sand.

I know there is no straight road No straight road in this world Only a giant labyrinth Of intersecting crossroads

In Spain, the dead are more alive than the dead of any other country in the world.

The wounds were burning like suns at five in the afternoon, and the crowd broke the windows At five in the afternoon. Ah, that fatal five in the afternoon! It was five by all the clocks! It was five in the shade of the afternoon!