The history of the world - by which, of course, we mean Europe - is a record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
For every poet it is always morning in the world; history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village. — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves. — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart… — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
If you talk about language in the Caribbean, you must relate it to history. — 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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
“I shall unlearn feeling, unlearn my gift. That is greater and harder than what passes there for life.” — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
The greatest writers have been, at heart, parochial, provincial in their rootedness. — Derek Walcott Copy Share Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
