Believing ourselves to be possessors of absolute truth degrades us: we regard every person whose way of thinking is different from ours as a monster and a threat and by so doing turn our own selves into monsters and threats to our fellows.

Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.

Enormous and solid but swaying, beaten by the wind but chained, murmur of a million leaves against my window. Riot of trees, surge of dark green sounds. The grove, suddenly still, is a web of fronds and branches.

What characterizes a poem is its necessary dependence on words as much as its struggle to transcend them.

Every view of the world that becomes extinct, every culture that disappears, diminishes a possibility of life

Solitude is the profoundest fact

Love is born at first sight; the friendship of a frequent and lengthy exchange.