Derek Walcott famous quotes

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor,
-- Derek Walcott

#Summer #Prose #Lemons

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

#Imagination #Special #Language

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

#Cities #Culture #Made

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

#Writing #Average #Poetry

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

#Passion #Mirrors

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

#Religious #Prayer #Believe

I read; I travel; I become
-- Derek Walcott

#Travel #Inspire

To change your language you must change your life.
-- Derek Walcott

#Life #Language #Changing Your Life

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

#Black History #Elements #Language

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.
-- Derek Walcott

#Inspiring #Mirrors #Doors

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.
-- Derek Walcott

#Style #Likes #Gestures

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

#Voice #Doe #Addresses

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

#Landscape #Sugar #Ruins

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

#Stars #Trying #Study

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.
-- Derek Walcott

#Art #Thinking #Soul

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

#Stronger #Vases #Granted

Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.
-- Derek Walcott

#Trying #Serious #Worthwhile

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.
-- Derek Walcott

#Heart #Wine #Mirrors

What are men? Children who doubt.
-- Derek Walcott

#Children #Men #Doubt

The classics can console. But not enough.
-- Derek Walcott

#Enough

The English language is nobody's special property.
-- Derek Walcott

#Special #Language #English Language

I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars.
-- Derek Walcott

#Horse #Stars #Block

We read, we travel, we become.
-- Derek Walcott

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

#Moving #Vocabulary #Islands

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

#Shadow #Metaphor

The future happens. No matter how much we scream.
-- Derek Walcott

#Matter #Scream

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

#Art #Church #Village

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
-- Derek Walcott

#Fire #White #Owl

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

#Cat #Vases #Shelves

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

#Past #Long #Too Much

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.
-- Derek Walcott

#Memories #Bamboo #Body

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

#Landscape #Surprise #Natural

In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
-- Derek Walcott

#Sleep #Eden #Evil

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.
-- Derek Walcott

#Heart #Mirrors #Letters

How can I turn from Africa and live?
-- Derek Walcott

#Turns

Time is the metre, memory the only plot.
-- Derek Walcott

#Time #Memories #Plot

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.
-- Derek Walcott

#Sunset #Dark #Sea