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To change your language you must change your life.

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
Language
Change
Must
Life

More quotes by Derek Walcott

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There's always more to see.
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The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
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When poems are no good they don't make any sense.
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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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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 classics can console. But not enough.
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The poem is itself a mirror.
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How can I turn from Africa and live?
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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.
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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.
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Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
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The thing that is believed is a reality.
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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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Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
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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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I look in the mirror. There's me. What's in the mirror is not real. So am I unreal?
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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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What are men? Children who doubt.
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The truth is that the poems are ecstatic.
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We read, we travel, we become.
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