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The truth is that the poems are ecstatic.

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
Ecstatic
Poems
Truth

More quotes by Derek Walcott

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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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The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.
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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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We read, we travel, we become.
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The mirror is believed the way a poem is believed. It's believed because it's there.
Derek Walcott
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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.
Derek Walcott
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You can't write drunk.
Derek Walcott
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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.
Derek Walcott
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The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
Derek Walcott
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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.
Derek Walcott
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To change your language you must change your life.
Derek Walcott
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The poem is itself a mirror.
Derek Walcott
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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.
Derek Walcott
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A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
Derek Walcott
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How can I turn from Africa and live?
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?
Derek Walcott
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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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There's always more to see.
Derek Walcott
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In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
Derek Walcott