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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.
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
Special
Imagination
Language
English
Property
Nobody
More quotes by Derek Walcott
I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
Derek Walcott
I look in the mirror. There's me. What's in the mirror is not real. So am I unreal?
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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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Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
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Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
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The mirror is believed the way a poem is believed. It's believed because it's there.
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The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
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In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
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How can I turn from Africa and live?
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When you get a class reciting some great poems, it'll tear your heart out.
Derek Walcott
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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The truth is that the poems are ecstatic.
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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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I read I travel I become
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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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When poems are no good they don't make any sense.
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The classics can console. But not enough.
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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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There's always more to see.
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To change your language you must change your life.
Derek Walcott
