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The poem is itself a mirror.

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
Poem
Mirror
Mirrors

More quotes by Derek Walcott

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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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She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.
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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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In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
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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 classics can console. But not enough.
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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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There's always more to see.
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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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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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I read I travel I become
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We read, we travel, we become.
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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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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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The thing that is believed is a reality.
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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.
Derek Walcott