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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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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
Heart
Reciting
Tear
Poems
Tears
Class
Great

More quotes by 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.
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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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You can't write drunk.
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The truth is that the poems are ecstatic.
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The thing that is believed is a reality.
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What are men? Children who doubt.
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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.
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In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
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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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Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
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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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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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The classics can console. But not enough.
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There's always more to see.
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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 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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When poems are no good they don't make any sense.
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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.
Derek Walcott