“I stopped writing in the obvious. I wrote how I saw it and if they don’t understand it, that’s fine.”

“words are strange creatures”

“Hay una estrella mas abiertaque la palabra ‘amapola’?Is there a star more wide openthan the word ‘poppy”?”

“You alone in Europe are not ancient oh ChristianityThe most modern European is you Pope Pius XAnd you whom the windows observe shame keeps youFrom entering a church and confessing this morningYou read the prospectuses the catalogues the billboards that sing aloudThat’s the poetry this morning and for the prose there are the newspapersThere are the 25 centime serials full of murder mysteriesPortraits of great men and a thousand different headlines(“Zone”)”

“Is there a better method of departure by night than this quiet bon voyage with an open book, the sole companion who has come to see you off, to wave you into the dark waters beyond language?”

“Put your mouthful of words away and come with me to watch the lilies open in such a field, growing there like yachts, slowly steering their petals without nurses or clocks.”

“Be a poet in action as well as in words.”

“Sometimes in composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then write it down.”

“By giving words the latitude she does, (Marianne) Van Hirtum emphasizes their contagious qualities: they become almost like viruses, with which it is necessary to put oneself in harmony by sympathetic magic if one is not to be overwhelmed. … What is essential is to become one with the sickness, that is, in the context of language as a whole, to enter into contact with words.”