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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
Africa
Turn
Turns
Live

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What are men? Children who doubt.
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The thing that is believed is a reality.
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I read I travel I become
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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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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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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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Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
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When you get a class reciting some great poems, it'll tear your heart out.
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The poem is itself a mirror.
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The classics can console. But not enough.
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There's always more to see.
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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 look in the mirror. There's me. What's in the mirror is not real. So am I unreal?
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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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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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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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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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You can't write drunk.
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We read, we travel, we become.
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