Derek Walcott Quotes
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Love After Love all your life, whom you have ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
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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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Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.
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I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars.
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In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
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What are men? Children who doubt.
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Americans are not brought up with meter. They're not brought up with poetry. If you try to get them to recite, they're too embarrassed.
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The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
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The truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element.
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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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When poems are no good they don't make any sense.
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The classics can console. But not enough.
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To change your language you must change your life.
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How can I turn from Africa and live?
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We read, we travel, we become.
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The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves . . .
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The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome.
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Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.
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If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
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The truth is that the poems are ecstatic.
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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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All of Victorian verse is pentameter.
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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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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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Who cares about a kid from the Midwest writing pentameter? It's stupid.
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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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Slowly my body grows a single sound, slowly I become a bell, an oval, disembodied vowel, I grow, an owl, an aureole, white fire poesia "Metamorfosi, I. Luna
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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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A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
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