“Poetry is a separate language, or more specifically, a language within a language.”

“All our language is composed of brief little dreams; and the wonderful thing is that we sometimes make of them strangely accurate and marvelously reasonable thoughts. What should we be without the help of that which does not exist? Very little. And our unoccupied minds would languish if fables, mistaken notions, abstractions, beliefs, and monsters, hypotheses, and the so-called problems of metaphysics did not people with beings and objectless images our natural depths and darkness. Myths are the souls of our actions and our loves. We cannot act without moving towards a phantom. We can love only what we create.”

“Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking.”

“Each of them, all unknowing, fairly gives its due to each chance of life, to each germ of death within itself.”

“I have made a similar suggestion for poetry: that one should approach it as pure sonority, reading and rereading it as a sort of music, and should not introduce meanings or intentions into the diction before clearly grasping the system of sounds that every poem must offer on pain of nonexistence.”

“I know nothing more stupid and indeed vulgar than wanting to be right.”

“My hand feels touched as well as it touches; reality says this, and nothing more.”