9 quotes
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.
I try to forget what happiness was,
and when that don't work, I study the stars.
The Schooner Flight (1980)
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 tribe but the astonishment of the soul.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
A Far Cry from Africa (1962)
Peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Collected Poems, 1948-1984 (1986)
Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.
for The Paris Review (1986)
I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation.
The Schooner Flight (1980)
The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
for The Paris Review (1986)
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Collected Poems, 1948-1984 (1986)