“Some beautiful paths can’t be discovered without getting lost.”

“Imagine others complexly.”

“I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers; thanks to your love a certain solid fragrence risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body. and: No one can stop the river of your hands, your eyes and their sleepiness, my dearest. You are the trembling of time, which passes between the vertical light and the darkening sky. and: From the stormy archipelagoes I brought my windy accordian, waves of crazy rain, the habitual slowness of natural things: they made up my wild heart.”

“Utajiri wa nje huwa unaanzia ndani, nao ni hekima.”

“A fool’s mind is at the mercy of his tongue and a wise man’s tongue is under the control ofhis mind.”

“In Zen, there is an old saying: The obstacle is the path. Know that a whole and happy life is not free of obstacles. Quite the contrary, a whole and happy life is riddled with obstacles-they simply become the very stepping-stones that help lift us to a new perspective. It is not what happens to us in this life that shapes us, it is how we choose to respond to what happens to us.”

“Do not give up hope.”

“O God make us your people. Be our God!”

“I think you will agree that life’s plans are not always tied up in neat little packages. Occasionally we find ourselves at unexpected crossroads with more than one opportunity from which to choose. Time itself is often the best indicator of which decision to make, for it can tell so many thing that are now hazy.”

“Four billion people on this earthbut my imagination is still the same.It’s bad with large numbers.It’s still taken by particularity.It flits in the dark like a flashlight,illuminating only random faceswhile all the rest go by,never coming to mind and never really missed.”

“A world made of skulls was no place for roses, and it was time to plant more than bones. (From the novel Following the Strandline)”

“Moonlight and high wind.Dark poplars toss, insinuate the sea.”

“…but it is good to be several floors up in the dead of night wondering whether you are any good or not and the only decision you can make is that you did it…”

“Only by learning the truth—whatever that truth might be—could people be given the right kind of power.”

“The question ‘Why poetry?’ isn’t asking what makes poetry unique among art forms; poetry may indeed share its origins with other forms of privileged utterance. A somewhat more interesting question would be: “What is the nature of experience, and especially the experience of using language, that calls poetic utterance into existence? What is there about experience that’s unutterable?” You can’t generalize very usefully about poetry; you can’t reduce its nature down to a kernel that underlies all its various incarnations. I guess my internal conversation suggests that if you can’t successfully answer the question of “Why poetry?,” can’t reduce it in the way I think you can’t, then maybe that’s the strongest evidence that poetry’s doing its job; it’s creating an essential need and then satisfying it.”