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When poems are no good they don't make any sense.

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
Poems
Sense
Make
Good

More quotes by 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.
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The poem is itself a mirror.
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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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We read, we travel, we become.
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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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A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
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The thing that is believed is a reality.
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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 truth is that the poems are ecstatic.
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Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
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You can't write drunk.
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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 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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In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
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She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.
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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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How can I turn from Africa and live?
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What are men? Children who doubt.
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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 first thing we have to do is get rid of the pentameter. To ditch the pentameter.
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