Quote

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

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
Made
Cities
Culture

More quotes by Derek Walcott

Image
What are men? Children who doubt.
Derek Walcott
Image
Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
Derek Walcott
Image
The mirror is believed the way a poem is believed. It's believed because it's there.
Derek Walcott
Image
The classics can console. But not enough.
Derek Walcott
Image
She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.
Derek Walcott
Image
We read, we travel, we become.
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
To change your language you must change your life.
Derek Walcott
Image
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.
Derek Walcott
Image
The first thing we have to do is get rid of the pentameter. To ditch the pentameter.
Derek Walcott
Image
The poem is itself a mirror.
Derek Walcott
Image
The thing that is believed is a reality.
Derek Walcott
Image
In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
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
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 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
Image
You can't write drunk.
Derek Walcott
Image
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?
Derek Walcott
Image
When you get a class reciting some great poems, it'll tear your heart out.
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