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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.

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
Art
Tribes
Soul
Awe
Human
Condition
Humans
Scientist
Good
Function
Always
Poet
Think
Conditions
Astonishment
Thinking
Science
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More quotes by Derek Walcott

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The thing that is believed is a reality.
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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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In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
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The classics can console. But not enough.
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The poem is itself a mirror.
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Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
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She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.
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When you get a class reciting some great poems, it'll tear your heart out.
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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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How can I turn from Africa and live?
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You can't write drunk.
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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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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 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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To change your language you must change your life.
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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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Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
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When poems are no good they don't make any sense.
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What are men? Children who doubt.
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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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