Sometimes I find myself thinking, rather wistfully, about Lao Tzu's famous dictum: 'Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish.' All around me I see something very different, let us say - a number of angry dwarfs trying to grill a whale.

Shoes twisted into incredible lilies.

It is difficult to get the news from poetry, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.

It's a strange courage you give me ancient star: Shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no part!

It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

[History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.