Derek Walcott Quotations

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

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.

Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.

Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.

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.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

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.

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.

This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo.

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.

Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven.

I have always been fascinated by the musical talent, the calypso, the carnival and the sweet sound of pan, ... Trinidad was the best place to host the world premier and to display the vast local talent.

He's just dominant. He knows how to play.

She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.

Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.

I know when dark-haired evening put on her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh, that there'd be no rest, there'd be no forgetting. Is like telling mourners round the graveside about resurrection, they want the dead back.

The classics can console. But not enough.

The English language is nobody's special property.

I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars.

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

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.

How can I turn from Africa and live?

In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.

I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don't work, I study the stars.

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.

Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.

The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves . . .

The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.

What are men? Children who doubt.

We read, we travel, we become.

The future happens. No matter how much we scream.

Time is the metre, memory the only plot.

I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style.

To change your language you must change your life.

Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

… the truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element…

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.

I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.

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.

Love After Love 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, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you 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.

I read; I travel; I become

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor,

We knew there was a point when Kevin would come through and carry us.

This image of us as being art supportive and very cultured is false, ... The money that we have now that is keeping this place going has come from Canada-the University of Toronto. When you come across sponsors like these gentlemen we have today, what it does for the individual artist is enormous. It means that we can feel that there is some direction to our lives.