Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, are all very good words for the lips.

You hesitate to stab me with a word, and know not – silence is the sharper sword.

The first duty of government is to see that people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.

As soon go kindle fire with snow, as seek to quench the fire of love with words.

The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot.

When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.

A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.

I have no desire to crow over anybody or to see anybody eating crow, figuratively or otherwise. We should all get together and make a country in which everybody can eat turkey whenever he pleases.

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.

Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.

We are masters of the unsaid words, but slaves of those we let slip out.

You may write me down in history with your bitter, twisted lines. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust, I’ll rise.

I was born in London in England in 1934. I went through, as a child, the horrors of World War II, through a time when food was rationed and we learned to be very careful, and we never had more to eat than what we needed to eat. There was no waste. Everything was used.

I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn’t poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

The first poems I knew were nursery rhymes, and before I could read them for myself, I had come to love just the words of them, the words alone.

The food here is terrible, and the portions are too small.

People want to listen to a message, word from Jah. This could be passed through me or anybody. I am not a leader. Messenger. The words of the songs, not the person, is what attracts people.

Let’s face it, a nice creamy chocolate cake does a lot for a lot of people; it does for me.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

Poetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.

Science arose from poetry… when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Words are but the signs of ideas.

I find in my poetry and prose the rhythms and imagery of the best – I mean, when I’m at my best – of the good Southern black preachers. The lyricism of the spirituals and the directness of gospel songs and the mystery of blues are in my music or in my poetry and prose, or I missed everything.

I’m not a sandwich store that only sells turkey sandwiches. I sell a lot of different things.

I have not worked out my poems with a careful will, falling rather on haphazard and blind formulation of wordage, a more flowing concept, in a hope for a more new and lively path. I do personalize at times, but this only for the grace and elan of the dance.

When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain.

First I shake the whole Apple tree, that the ripest might fall. Then I climb the tree and shake each limb, and then each branch and then each twig, and then I look under each leaf.

But time has set its maggot on their track.

Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.

Eating is so intimate. It’s very sensual. When you invite someone to sit at your table and you want to cook for them, you’re inviting a person into your life.

All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.

We have food all around us all the time, and if we haven’t eaten for three hours, we think we’re starving. You’re not starving – human beings can go for 30 days without food.

When men and woman die, as poets sung, his heart’s the last part moves, her last, the tongue.

Music in itself carries a whole set of messages which are very, very rich and complex, and the words either serve to exclude certain ones or point up certain others.

If I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.

Happy the man whose wish and care a few paternal acres bound, content to breathe his native air in his own ground.

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand.

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.

I won’t eat anything green.

I love food.

Words differently arranged have a different meaning, and meanings differently arranged have different effects.

We never repent of having eaten too little.

My weaknesses have always been food and men – in that order.

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.

We are tired of aristocratic explanations in Harvard words.

Meals make the society, hold the fabric together in lots of ways that were charming and interesting and intoxicating to me. The perfect meal, or the best meals, occur in a context that frequently has very little to do with the food itself.

Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul – and sings the tunes without the words – and never stops at all.

French fries kill more people than guns and sharks, yet nobody’s afraid of French fries.

One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.

I love the masochistic aspect of eating seething, real Sichuan food in Sichuan Province.

If you wish to know the mind of a man, listen to his words.

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them.

Of course, animals have to be killed for food or to prevent their doing injury to others or to property. But such killing is too often carried out without regard to the pain inflicted.