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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.

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
Love
Poet
World
Poetry
Morning
History
Fall
Insomniac
Night
Spite
Every
Forgotten
Always
Fate

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There's always more to see.
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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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In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
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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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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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Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
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You can't write drunk.
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How can I turn from Africa and live?
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She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.
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The truth is that the poems are ecstatic.
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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 mirror is believed the way a poem is believed. It's believed because it's there.
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When you get a class reciting some great poems, it'll tear your heart out.
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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 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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The first thing we have to do is get rid of the pentameter. To ditch the pentameter.
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I read I travel I become
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To change your language you must change your life.
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A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
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