“When I was 16, I was taught by a wonderful teacher who let me ignore the Greek syllabus and just read Homer.”

“Stripped of its plot, the 'Iliad' is a scattering of names and biographies of ordinary soldiers: men who trip over their shields, lose their courage or miss their wives. In addition to these, there...”

“I think it's often assumed that the role of poetry is to comfort, but for me, poetry is the great unsettler. It questions the established order of the mind. It is radical, by which I don't mean tha...”

“If you put a real leaf and a silk leaf side by side, you'll see something of the difference between Homer's poetry and anyone else's. There seem to be real leaves still alive in the 'Iliad,' real a...”

“Lost Time is never found again.”

“How you spend your time is more important than how you spend your money. Money mistakes can be corrected, but time is gone forever.”

“Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them.”

“When we look up at the sky, we are trying to find the way back to ourselves”

“Only weak thinkers do not love the sky.”

“Your sky is full of stars and my arms too short to reach a piece to call my own”

“They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked high...”

“The world seemed to shimmer a little at the edges.”

“If we cannot accept the importance of the world, which considers itself important, if in the midst of that world our laughter finds no echo, we have but one choice: to take the world as a whole and...”