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How can I turn from Africa and live?

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
Turn
Turns
Live
Africa

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When poems are no good they don't make any sense.
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The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
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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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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 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 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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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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There's always more to see.
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The poem is itself a mirror.
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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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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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A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
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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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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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She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.
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You can't write drunk.
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The thing that is believed is a reality.
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What are men? Children who doubt.
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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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