Quote

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

Derek Walcott

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Imagination
Language
English
Property
Nobody
Special

More quotes by Derek Walcott

Image
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.
Derek Walcott
Image
The classics can console. But not enough.
Derek Walcott
Image
For every poet it is always morning in the world history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history.
Derek Walcott
Image
The thing that is believed is a reality.
Derek Walcott
Image
I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
Derek Walcott
Image
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.
Derek Walcott
Image
I look in the mirror. There's me. What's in the mirror is not real. So am I unreal?
Derek Walcott
Image
In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
Derek Walcott
Image
When you get a class reciting some great poems, it'll tear your heart out.
Derek Walcott
Image
The first thing we have to do is get rid of the pentameter. To ditch the pentameter.
Derek Walcott
Image
When poems are no good they don't make any sense.
Derek Walcott
Image
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.
Derek Walcott
Image
Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
Derek Walcott
Image
There's always more to see.
Derek Walcott
Image
The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
Derek Walcott
Image
I read I travel I become
Derek Walcott
Image
The truth is that the poems are ecstatic.
Derek Walcott
Image
The mirror is believed the way a poem is believed. It's believed because it's there.
Derek Walcott
Image
A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
Derek Walcott
Image
The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.
Derek Walcott