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In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.

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
Sleeps
Serpent
Eden
Happiest
Sleep
Evil

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To change your language you must change your life.
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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 classics can console. But not enough.
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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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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.
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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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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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We read, we travel, we become.
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The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
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Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
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The poem is itself a mirror.
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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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Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
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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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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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There's always more to see.
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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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She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.
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When poems are no good they don't make any sense.
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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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