Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow.

When the poet is in love, he is incapable of writing poetry on love. He has to write when he remembers that he was in love.

We were clever enough to turn a laundry list into poetry.

I suspect that there is no serious scholar who doesn’t like to watch television. I’m just the only one who confesses.

Every thing thinks, but according to its complexity. If this is so, then stones also think...and this stone thinks only I stone, I stone, I stone. But perhaps it cannot even say I. It thinks: Stone, stone, stone... God enjoys being All, as this stone enjoys being almost nothing, but since it knows no other way of being, it is pleased with its own way, eternally satisfied with itself.

The monkish vows keep us far from that sink of vice that is the female body, but often they bring us close to other errors. Can I finally hide from myself the fact that even today my old age is still stirred by the noonday demon when my eyes, in choir, happen to linger on the beardless face of a novice, pure and fresh as a maidens?

Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the creator is revealed.