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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
Science
Tribe
Thinking
Art
Tribes
Soul
Awe
Human
Condition
Humans
Scientist
Function
Good
Poet
Always
Conditions
Astonishment
Think

More quotes by Derek Walcott

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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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We read, we travel, we become.
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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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How can I turn from Africa and live?
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To change your language you must change your life.
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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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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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There's always more to see.
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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 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 first thing we have to do is get rid of the pentameter. To ditch the pentameter.
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In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
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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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The poem is itself a mirror.
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The classics can console. But not enough.
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Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
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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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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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