“Poetic talent doesn’t operate in a vacuum. There is a spirit of Polish poetry.”

All the best have something in common, a regard for reality, an agreement to its primacy over the imagination.

Memory at last has what I sought.

I am a tarsier and a tarsier’s son, the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers, a tiny creature, made up of two pupils and whatever simply could not be left out.

Poets yearn, of course, to be published, read, and understood, but they do little, if anything, to set themselves above the common herd and the daily grind.

Though I may deny poets their monopoly on inspiration, I still place them in a select group of Fortune’s darlings.

Let the people who never find true love keep saying that there’s no such thing. Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

Dying – you can’t do that to a cat.

I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems.

When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past. When I pronounce the word Silence, I destroy it.

Even a graphomaniac is an extremely complicated person.

Get to know other worlds, if only for comparison.

I’m drowning in papers.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.

At the very beginning of my creative life I loved humanity. I wanted to do something good for mankind. Soon I understood that it isn’t possible to save mankind.

You can find the entire cosmos lurking in its least remarkable objects.

Religion operates on the principle ‘I obey-therefore I am accepted by God.’ But the operating principle of the gospel is ‘I am accepted by God through what Christ has done-therefore I obey.’

The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit.

And even in terms of justice, law codes, the legal system. A person who does not know English in Africa is excluded from that system because he can only operate through acts of translation.

You get another person who operates only in an African language and there are many persons who operate only in African languages; he or she is excluded from all the goodies that come with English.

An investor who proposes to ignore near-term market fluctuations needs greater resources for safety and must not operate on so large a scale, if at all, with borrowed money.

Indeed, the evidence supporting the efficacy of group therapy, and the prevailing sentiment of the mental health profession, are sufficiently strong that it would be difficult to defend the adequacy of the inpatient unit that attempted to operate without a small group program.

The miscegenation laws of the South only operate against the legitimate union of the races; they leave the white man free to seduce all the colored girls he can, but it is death to the colored man who yields to the force and advances of a similar attraction in white women.

I pray before I go into the operating room for every case, and I ask him to give me wisdom, to help me to know what to do – and not only for operating, but for everything.