“My turn shall also come:I sense the spreading of a wing.”

“Where to start?Everything cracks and shakes,The air trembles with similes,No one world's better than another;the earth moans with metaphors.”

“I do not know how it is elsewhere, but here, in this country, poetry is a healing, life-giving thing, and people have not lost the gift of being able to drink of its inner strength. People can be k...”

“Only in Russia poetry is respected--it gets people killed.”

“One cannot launch a new history the idea is altogether unthinkable; there would not be the continuity and tradition. Tradition cannot be contrived or learned. In its absence one has, at the best, ...”

“The people need poetry that will be their own secretTo keep them awake forever,And bathe them in the bright-haired wave of its breathing.”

“Armenians have more imagination than Mohammedans.”

“The eyes of the Armenians speak long before the lips move and long after they cease to.”

“Never underestimate the power of the spiritual world.”

“He sleeps for himself and dreams for others.”

“We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabular...”

“But Sasha was from Russia, where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden and sentences are often left unfinished from doubt as how to best end them.”

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe wh...”