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

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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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The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
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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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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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Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
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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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The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.
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Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
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To change your language you must change your life.
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There's always more to see.
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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 first thing we have to do is get rid of the pentameter. To ditch the pentameter.
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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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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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She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.
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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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The classics can console. But not enough.
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