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

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In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
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There's always more to see.
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Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
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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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When poems are no good they don't make any sense.
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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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The first thing we have to do is get rid of the pentameter. To ditch the pentameter.
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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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How can I turn from Africa and live?
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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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I look in the mirror. There's me. What's in the mirror is not real. So am I unreal?
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You can't write drunk.
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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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The classics can console. But not enough.
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She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.
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We read, we travel, we become.
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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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The thing that is believed is a reality.
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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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