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

There's always more to see..

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average..

Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe. I don't think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human t….

The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estate….

I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of phy….

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor..

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 welc….

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole..

The truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element..

To change your language you must change your life..

How can I turn from Africa and live?.

Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves..

I read; I travel; I become.

The mirror is believed the way a poem is believed. It's believed because it's there..

For every poet it is always morning in the world; history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite….

I look in the mirror. There's me. What's in the mirror is not real. So am I unreal?.

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 th….

We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past..

Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life..

I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation..