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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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We read, we travel, we become.
Derek Walcott
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I read I travel I become
Derek Walcott
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The truth is that the poems are ecstatic.
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How can I turn from Africa and live?
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When poems are no good they don't make any sense.
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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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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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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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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
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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.
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 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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When you get a class reciting some great poems, it'll tear your heart out.
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What are men? Children who doubt.
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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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In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
Derek Walcott
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Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
Derek Walcott
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The poem is itself a mirror.
Derek Walcott
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The thing that is believed is a reality.
Derek Walcott
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The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
Derek Walcott