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 personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.

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

Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven.

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

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