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We read, we travel, we become.

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
Travel
Read
Become

More quotes by 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.
Derek Walcott
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Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
Derek Walcott
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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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What are men? Children who doubt.
Derek Walcott
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In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
Derek Walcott
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A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
Derek Walcott
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The thing that is believed is a reality.
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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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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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
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When poems are no good they don't make any sense.
Derek Walcott
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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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You can't write drunk.
Derek Walcott
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The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
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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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.
Derek Walcott
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The truth is that the poems are ecstatic.
Derek Walcott
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I look in the mirror. There's me. What's in the mirror is not real. So am I unreal?
Derek Walcott
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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?
Derek Walcott