Quote

In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.

Derek Walcott

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Sleeps
Serpent
Eden
Happiest
Sleep
Evil

More quotes by Derek Walcott

Image
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
Image
Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
Derek Walcott
Image
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
Image
She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.
Derek Walcott
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The poem is itself a mirror.
Derek Walcott
Image
A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
Derek Walcott
Image
The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.
Derek Walcott
Image
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.
Derek Walcott
Image
How can I turn from Africa and live?
Derek Walcott
Image
The truth is that the poems are ecstatic.
Derek Walcott
Image
When poems are no good they don't make any sense.
Derek Walcott
Image
I look in the mirror. There's me. What's in the mirror is not real. So am I unreal?
Derek Walcott
Image
Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
Derek Walcott
Image
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
Image
The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
Derek Walcott
Image
The classics can console. But not enough.
Derek Walcott
Image
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
Image
When you get a class reciting some great poems, it'll tear your heart out.
Derek Walcott