Derek Walcott

Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs…

— Derek Walcott

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

— 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…

— 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…

— Derek Walcott

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

— Derek Walcott

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

— Derek Walcott

The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each…

— Derek Walcott

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when…

— 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…

— Derek Walcott

My family background really only consists of my mother. She was a widow. My father died quite young; he must have been…

— Derek Walcott

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

— Derek Walcott

Like any art, what is the most imprisoning thing is also the most delivering thing. If an actor knows he only has…

— Derek Walcott

The thing that is believed is a reality.

— Derek Walcott

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

— 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

A noun is not a name you give something. It is something you watch becoming itself, and you have to have the…

— Derek Walcott

I always have difficulty with the Greek tragic plays. I think the difficulty one has - which is a serious problem -…

— Derek Walcott

Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next.

— Derek Walcott

My delight in things is definitely Caribbean. It has to do with landscape and food. The fact that my language may have…

— Derek Walcott

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

— Derek Walcott

I don't believe that poetry is in danger because nobody wants to read it or appreciate it. There is a tremendous audience…

— Derek Walcott

The painter I really thought I could learn from was Cezanne - some sort of resemblance to oranges and greens and browns…

— Derek Walcott

When poems are no good they don't make any sense.

— Derek Walcott

I don't think poetry has a readership anywhere, really, that's that big.

— Derek Walcott

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor,

— Derek Walcott