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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.

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
Individual
Melody
Metre
Body
Moves
Joins
Like
Luck
Biography
Whose
Biographies
Walking
Vocabulary
Personal
Island
Sound
Islands
Moving
Waking

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How can I turn from Africa and live?
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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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Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
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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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There's always more to see.
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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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The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
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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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We read, we travel, we become.
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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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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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When poems are no good they don't make any sense.
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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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What are men? Children who doubt.
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Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
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You can't write drunk.
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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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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 thing that is believed is a reality.
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The truth is that the poems are ecstatic.
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