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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
Truth
Ecstatic
Poems

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?
Derek Walcott
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When poems are no good they don't make any sense.
Derek Walcott
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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.
Derek Walcott
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In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
Derek Walcott
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We read, we travel, we become.
Derek Walcott
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What are men? Children who doubt.
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Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
Derek Walcott
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The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
Derek Walcott
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I look in the mirror. There's me. What's in the mirror is not real. So am I unreal?
Derek Walcott
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To change your language you must change your life.
Derek Walcott
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A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
Derek Walcott
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When you get a class reciting some great poems, it'll tear your heart out.
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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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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I read I travel I become
Derek Walcott
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The poem is itself a mirror.
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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The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.
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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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.
Derek Walcott