"One rational voice is dumb: over a grave The household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved. Sad is Eros, builder of cities, And weeping anarchic Aphrodite."

"To us he is no more a person Now but a whole climate of opinion."

"An important Jew who died in exile."

"In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise."

"In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate;Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye."

"Time that with this strange excuse Pardoned Kipling and his views, And will pardon Paul Claudel, Pardons him for writing well."

"Earth, receive an honoured guest; William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry."

"You were silly like us: your gift survived it all; The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself; mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its saying where executives Would never want to tamper; it flows south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth."

"Each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom."

"When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse."

"By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems."

"He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, And snow disfigured the public statues; The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day."

"Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard."

"Our researchers into Public Opinion are content That he held the proper opinions for the time of year; When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went."

"Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets."

"O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you’ve missed.The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea cup opens A lane to the land of the dead."

"I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you Till China and Africa meet And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street.I’ll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky."

"The expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."

"In 1948 I addressed some students at Washington and Lee University, and in the question-answer period one young man observed with asperity, "But it's easy for you to write. You've traveled.""

"He had obtained a clearer view of his homeland by leaving it and seeing it through the eyes of others."

"Silence, much more powerful than before, much more shot through with the meaning of life and the accumulated wisdom of history."

"Second, after a painful gap without any king, and a furious struggle by various foreign powers to elect men favorable to them, the Seym chose a pathetic Polish incompetent, who had the good sense to die rather promptly."

"...the crucial Battle of Zamość, which is not stressed in most current histories because it involved a Polish-Russian battle in which the Poles won."

"A Pole is a man born with a sword in his right hand, a brick in his left. When the battle is over, he starts to rebuild."

"No invader has ever conquered the heart of Poland, that spirit which is the inheritance of sons and daughters, the private passion of families and the ancient, unbreakable tie to all those who came before."

"In a small Polish farm community, during the fall planting season of 1981, events occurred which electrified the world, sending reverberations of magnitude to capitals as diverse as Washington, Peking and especially Moscow."

"Scientists dream about doing great things. Engineers do them."

"An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it."

"On 24 October 1944 Planet Earth was following its orbit about the sun as it has obediently done for nearly five billion years."

"Always remember, your uncle was a thief. He stole what was rightfully yours."

"We guard them. We punish them if we recover them. We chain them. And still they seek their freedom."

"When you seek, you find things you did not anticipate."

"Until you've seen Zimbabwe, you live in darkness."

"It was the silent time before dawn, along the shores of what had been one of the most beautiful lakes in southern Africa."

"You love the Hawaiians as potential Christians, but you despise them as people. I am proud to say that I have come to exactly the opposite conclusion, and it is therefore appropriate that I should be expelled from a mission where love is not."

"Look, son, if you calculate on getting me drunk and outsmarting me, quit now, because you simply can't do it."

"In later years, it would become fashionable to say of the missionaries, "They came to the islands to do good, and they did right well." Others made jest of the missionary slogan, "They came to a nation in darkness; they left it in light," by pointing out: "Of course they left Hawaii lighter. They stole every goddamned thing that wasn't nailed down.""

"It is difficult to be king when the gods are changing."

"No man leaves where he is and seeks a distant place unless he is in some respect a failure."

"Therefore, men of Polynesia and Boston and China and Mount Fuji and the barrios of the Philippines, do not come to these islands empty-handed, or craven in spirit, or afraid to starve. There is no food here. In these islands there is no certainty. Bring your own food, your own gods, your own flowers and fruits and concepts. For if you come without resources to these islands you will perish... On these harsh terms the islands waited."

"Millions upon millions of years ago, when the continents were already formed and the principal features of the earth had been decided, there existed, then as now, one aspect of the world that dwarfed all others… a mighty ocean, resting uneasily to the east of the largest continent, a restless ever-changing, gigantic body of water that would later be described as Pacific."

"I feel myself the inheritor of a great background of people. Just who, precisely, they were, I have never known. I might be part Negro, might be part Jew, part Muslim, part Irish. So I can't afford to be supercilious about any group of people because I may be that people."

"I had been sent to Mexico to cover a murder, one of a remarkable kind."

"I decided (after listening to a "talk radio" commentator who abused, vilified, and scorned every noble cause to which I had devoted my entire life) that I was both a humanist and a liberal, each of the most dangerous and vilified type. I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create a reasonably decent society. I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril. I do not believe that pure reason can solve the perpetual problems unless it is modified by poetry and art and social vision. So I am a humanist. And if you want to charge me with being the most virulent kind—a secular humanist—I accept the accusation."

"If you type adeptly with 10 fingers, you’re typing faster than your mind is working."

"I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains."

"The chief character in this narrative is the Caribbean Sea, one of the world's most alluring bodies of water, a rare gem among the oceans, defined by the islands that form a chain of lovely jewels to the north and east."

"A group of two dozen nurses completely surrounded by 100,000 unattached American men."

"About a billion years ago, long before the continents had separated to define the ancient oceans, or their own outlines had been determined, a small protuberance jutted out from the northwest corner of what would later become North America."

"The arrogance of the artist is a very profound thing, and it fortifies you."