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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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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
Never
Vocation
Believing
Grown
Poetry
Prayer
Religious
Writing
Believe
Separated
More quotes by Derek Walcott
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.
Derek Walcott
The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.
Derek Walcott
There's always more to see.
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Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
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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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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
The classics can console. But not enough.
Derek Walcott
You can't write drunk.
Derek Walcott
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
The truth is that the poems are ecstatic.
Derek Walcott
When poems are no good they don't make any sense.
Derek Walcott
Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
Derek Walcott
The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
Derek Walcott
How can I turn from Africa and live?
Derek Walcott
We read, we travel, we become.
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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
To change your language you must change your life.
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She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.
Derek Walcott
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.
Derek Walcott