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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
Believe
Separated
Never
Vocation
Believing
Grown
Poetry
Prayer
Religious
Writing

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The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
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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.
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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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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.
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The thing that is believed is a reality.
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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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When poems are no good they don't make any sense.
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There's always more to see.
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How can I turn from Africa and live?
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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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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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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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The first thing we have to do is get rid of the pentameter. To ditch the pentameter.
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The classics can console. But not enough.
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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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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 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 voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.
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A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
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