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You can't write drunk.

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
Drunk
Write
Writing

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How can I turn from Africa and live?
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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 classics can console. But not enough.
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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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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 poem is itself a mirror.
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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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We read, we travel, we become.
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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 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 truth is that the poems are ecstatic.
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When you get a class reciting some great poems, it'll tear your heart out.
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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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The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
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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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When poems are no good they don't make any sense.
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The thing that is believed is a reality.
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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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