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I read I travel I become

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
Inspire
Travel
Read
Become

More quotes by Derek Walcott

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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.
Derek Walcott
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She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.
Derek Walcott
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We read, we travel, we become.
Derek Walcott
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In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
Derek Walcott
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When poems are no good they don't make any sense.
Derek Walcott
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The thing that is believed is a reality.
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.
Derek Walcott
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The first thing we have to do is get rid of the pentameter. To ditch the pentameter.
Derek Walcott
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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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How can I turn from Africa and live?
Derek Walcott
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A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
Derek Walcott
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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.
Derek Walcott
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To change your language you must change your life.
Derek Walcott
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The truth is that the poems are ecstatic.
Derek Walcott
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When you get a class reciting some great poems, it'll tear your heart out.
Derek Walcott
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The classics can console. But not enough.
Derek Walcott
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The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.
Derek Walcott
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Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
Derek Walcott
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What are men? Children who doubt.
Derek Walcott
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I look in the mirror. There's me. What's in the mirror is not real. So am I unreal?
Derek Walcott