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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
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Derek Alton Walcott
Sir Derek Alton Walcott
Sound
Islands
Moving
Waking
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Body
Moves
Joins
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Luck
Biography
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Biographies
Walking
Vocabulary
Personal
Island
More quotes by Derek Walcott
Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
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When poems are no good they don't make any sense.
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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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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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You can't write drunk.
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Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
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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.
Derek Walcott
The poem is itself a mirror.
Derek Walcott
To change your language you must change your life.
Derek Walcott
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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I look in the mirror. There's me. What's in the mirror is not real. So am I unreal?
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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 truth is that the poems are ecstatic.
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The classics can console. But not enough.
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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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We read, we travel, we become.
Derek Walcott
I read I travel I become
Derek Walcott
There's always more to see.
Derek Walcott
