There's always more to see.

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

The history of the world - by which, of course, we mean Europe - is a record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic cleansings.

— Derek Walcott

The thing that is believed is a reality.

— Derek Walcott

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

“I am the man my father loved and was.”

— Derek Walcott

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

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

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

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

The greatest writers have been, at heart, parochial, provincial in their rootedness.

— Derek Walcott

“I shall unlearn feeling, unlearn my gift. That is greater and harder than what passes there for life.”

— Derek Walcott

“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

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

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

— Derek Walcott

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