“That's what a poem is. Words which have a hidden meaning. A poem is like a secret.”

“'The White Woman on the Green Bicycle' is a love story mapped onto an unfolding political tragedy: that of the failure of the Independence era in Trinidad.”

“That's what a poem is. Words which have a hidden meaning. A poem is like a secret.”

“He had a strange relationship with books. He had the notion that people who wrote novels were also lonely. He believed this more and more, reading between the lines of the novels he'd loved. Most books were about one kind of loneliness or another, about people who couldn't get what they wanted, people who found things hard, who were slow, or sad, or difficult. So he read most evenings, finding a comfort in following words written by someone like him.”

“Travelling, he'd always thought, was where he'd meet his other self. Somewhere in a foreign place, he would bump into the bit of himself which was lost.”