"The watchers below pulled in their breath all at once. The air felt suddenly shared. The man above was a word they seemed to know, though they had not heard it before."

"Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful."

"I do not remember any other term when the force that had captured the political power in this country had become so vulgar as it is today, so corrupt, and so hypocritical; when the legal system had been so downtrodden, deteriorated, collapsed and turned into a means of cruelty."

"Creativity is a hidden gem. Education is needed to uncover it."

"A poem is a living organism."

"The poet should be responsible to the poem."

"In the most affirming places of their love Suddenly they grew tired, out of breath Little by little they felt the death Of some places left in darkness"

"Once more in that hour of darkness In dark black waters they arise Dark songs pass before their eyes They lie awake gazing into darkness"

"I want to write poetry, I'm bored, disgusted by my habits If I stop thinking and put my hands down perhaps I will have much to say I'm scurrying to the attic like a solitary bug Before you become old and ugly, I must kiss you on the nose"

"I'd make me into a brand new sailor if I were God Maybe there were new things over there It comes from within me to write as though rabid, I'm hungry, do you understand Let the doctors call it what they will Who can know anything best of all What does it mean to know anything best Which religion doesn't grow old"

"Writing poems is perhaps the loveliest deception Later they'll make a picture or something, then go and drink wine"

"Is the truth of tablecloths to be spread? How awful always to take refuge in known words A person should let himself go."

"Gulls into the water, women proudly into the bazaars I was going to write a poem, I was stifling, fed up with old things Eat, my mother says, but they're all things I've grown accustomed to, in the end. Like Camus and — I don’t know — people like that, I'm cracking up Everything will begin when it untangles itself from your hair"

"Death, one experiences alone Love is a two-person thing"

"I've learned some things from having lived: If you're alive, experience largely, merge with rivers, heavens, cosmos For what we call living is a gift given to life And life is a gift bestowed upon us"

"Distant lands should draw you, people you don't know To read every book, know other's lives, you should be burning You shouldn't exchange for anything the pleasure of a glass of water No matter how much the joy, your life should be filled with yearning"

"To your utmost, listen to every beautiful song As though filling all the self with sound and melody One should plunge head-first into life As one dives from a cliff into the emerald sea"

"A person can gaze at the sky for hours Can gaze for hours at a bird, a child, the sea To live on the earth is to become part of it To strike down roots that won't pull free"

"I've learned some things from having lived: If you're alive, experience one thing with all your power Your beloved should be worn out from being kissed And you should drop exhausted from the smelling of a flower"

"They were eyes, that while gazing on the world Rendered it brilliant with meaning They were eyes, that embraced me with glances They were eyes, for which I now hopelessly long"

"I don't say I was 'proceeding down a thoroughfare', I say I 'walked down the road'. I don't say I 'passed a hallowed institute of learning', I say I 'passed a school'. You don't wear all your jewellery at once. You're much more believable if you talk in your own voice."

"Years ago we discovered the exact point, the dead centre of middle age. It occurs when you are too young to take up golf and too old to rush up to the net."

"Elections are won by men and women chiefly because most people vote against somebody rather than for somebody."

"When the political columnists say 'Every thinking man' they mean themselves, and when candidates appeal to 'Every intelligent voter' they mean everybody who is going to vote for them."

"The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe, with a conviction based on experience, that you can fool all of the people all of the time."

"There are plenty of good five-cent cigars in the country. The trouble is they cost a quarter. What this country really needs is a good five-cent nickel"

"Christmas is over and Business is Business."

"She was charming, intelligent, warm, generous in her time, with her effort, with her work. I just had the greatest of respect for her because she suffered badly from arthritis, and she had a lot of pain, and she never complained, you know."

"She had that great gift of making you feel life was worth living. A very, very special person."

"She rearranged a whole wall of books so it was completely full of Irish writers. She didn't look like she was any trouble so no one caught her."

"She had time for everybody. Perhaps because her stories came from all of us and for all of us."

"On my 100th birthday, piloting Gordon and myself into the side of a mountain."

"I often wonder that if I had met Hitler, I reckon I might have found some streak of decency in him."

"I once tried to write a novel about revenge. It's the only book I didn't finish. I couldn't get into the mind of the person who was plotting vengeance."

"Suddenly they asked me, as only the French would, ‘Madame, what is your philosophy of life?’ What a cosmic question, but I had to answer, and answer quickly, because it was live. So I said, in French, ‘I think that you’ve got to play the hand that you’re dealt and stop wishing for another hand.’"

"(A) writer, a man I loved and he loved me and we got married and it was great and is still great. He believed I could do anything, just as my parents had believed all those years ago, and I started to write fiction and that took off fine. And he loved Ireland, and the fax was invented so we writers could live anywhere we liked, instead of living in London near publishers."

"It's like if you don't go to a dance you can never be rejected but you'll never get to dance either."

"I write exactly as I speak, so therefore I would not say any writer influenced me at all."

"America's problem is how to free itself from the grip of it's exhausted ideas."

"The frontier that remains is is the interior one, the most forbidding and mysterious frontier."

"Our culture is teleological-it presumes purposive development and a conclusion."

"The truth is that history constantly presents new problems in the guise of old."

"A great nation's foreign policy involves power, money, trade, oil and arms, but it proeeds from ideas."

"It is one of the perceptual defects of Western government and press to assign Western-style motives to what people do in non-Western societies, as if these are universally relevant."

"Foreign policy deals across time as well as space."

"The achievement of nationhood is a product not only of time and circumstance but usually of war and suffering as well."

"One cannot say that it will never happen again, or that it cannot happen."

"These choices by small countries are vital for them, but may be more momentous than commonly understood for others as well, including the major powers, who presumptuously believe they are in control of events."

"The center holds; passion falls away. That is what happened ideologically in Western Europe over recent years."

"But Americans are different from everyone else in the world - except the Canadians, and Americans are more different from the Canadians than they often think."