If you talk about language in the Caribbean, you must relate it to history. — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
… the truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
I am only one-eighth the writer I might have been had I contained all the fragmented languages of Trinidad. — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
“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 Copy Share Image
I hate all that nonsense about not touching the colonialists' language. All that about it being corrupting and belonging to the master… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
The country that I was coming from, the island I was in, hadn't been written about, really. So I thought that I… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
My delight in things is definitely Caribbean. It has to do with landscape and food. The fact that my language may have… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
“There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the… — Derek Walcott Copy Share
I don't feel I've arrived home until I get on the beach. All my life, the theater of the sea has been a very… — Derek Walcott Copy Share
“As human beings we’ve certainly suffered the loss of awe, the loss of sacredness, and the loss of the fact that we’re not here—… — Derek Walcott Copy Share
“I shall unlearn feeling, unlearn my gift. That is greater and harder than what passes there for life.” — Derek Walcott Copy Share
The greatest writers have been, at heart, parochial, provincial in their rootedness. — Derek Walcott Copy Share
The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile… — Derek Walcott Copy Share
Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was… — Derek Walcott Copy Share
My mother, who is nearly ninety now, still talks continually about my father. All my life, I've been aware of her grief about his… — Derek Walcott Copy Share
My family background really only consists of my mother. She was a widow. My father died quite young; he must have been thirty-one. Then… — Derek Walcott Copy Share
Like any art, what is the most imprisoning thing is also the most delivering thing. If an actor knows he only has 12 syllables… — Derek Walcott Copy Share
The history of the world - by which, of course, we mean Europe - is a record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic cleansings. — Derek Walcott Copy Share
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 Copy Share
