Quote

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.

Derek Walcott

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Derek Walcott
Age: 87 †
Born: 1930
Born: January 23
Died: 2017
Died: March 17
Author
Playwright
Poet
Prosaist
Writer
Derek Alton Walcott
Sir Derek Alton Walcott
Love
Vases
Symmetry
Fragments
Granted
Stronger
Took
Break
Whole
Vase

More quotes by Derek Walcott

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I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
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The first thing we have to do is get rid of the pentameter. To ditch the pentameter.
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In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
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Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god.
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Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
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Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe. I don't think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.
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We read, we travel, we become.
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The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.
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The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
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The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.
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There's always more to see.
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When you get a class reciting some great poems, it'll tear your heart out.
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When poems are no good they don't make any sense.
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How can I turn from Africa and live?
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I look in the mirror. There's me. What's in the mirror is not real. So am I unreal?
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To change your language you must change your life.
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The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
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We look and see what we see in a mirror, and we believe it. That's important, the question of belief. The question is: Should we believe what we see in a mirror?
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The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island.
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A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
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