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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
Turns
Live
Africa
Turn

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To change your language you must change your life.
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In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
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Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
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A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
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There's always more to see.
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The classics can console. But not enough.
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We read, we travel, we become.
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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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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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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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When you get a class reciting some great poems, it'll tear your heart out.
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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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