Derek Walcott Quotes

37 quotes in 416 categories

• Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
• Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.
• The English language is nobody's special property.
• Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.
• The classics can console. But not enough.
• I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
• A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
• We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.
• 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…
• The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves…
• To change your language you must change your life.
• 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,…
• We read, we travel, we become.
• Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor,
• 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.
• Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.
• I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don't work, I study the stars.
• In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.
• The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.
• How can I turn from Africa and live?

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