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The first thing we have to do is get rid of the pentameter. To ditch the pentameter.

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
Pentameter
Ditch
Firsts
First
Thing

More quotes by Derek Walcott

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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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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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A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
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In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
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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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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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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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She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.
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Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
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The truth is that the poems are ecstatic.
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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 thing that is believed is a reality.
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The classics can console. But not enough.
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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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Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
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We read, we travel, we become.
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You can't write drunk.
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There's always more to see.
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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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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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