Cynicism Quote by Derek Walcott

“I think I would have been a totally different kind of writer if I'd gone to England. I might have developed a cynicism about my origins, a belittling of them, or an excessive nostalgia for them.” quote by Derek Walcott — Download Open image

“I think I would have been a totally different kind of writer if I'd gone to England. I might have developed a cynicism about my origins, a belittling of them, or an excessive nostalgia for them.”

Derek Walcott

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

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

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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…

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“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— we’re not put on earth— to shape it anyway we want... You want something to happen with poetry, but it doesn’t make anything happen. So then somebody says, “What’s the use of poetry?” Then you say,…

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

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

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The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you…

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

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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…

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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…

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

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Like any art, what is the most imprisoning thing is also the most delivering thing. If an actor knows he only has 12 syllables…

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“Wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up faster.”

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If you're going to reach for it, reach all the way for it. Albums like 'Purple Rain' and 'Thriller' and those kind of records,…

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There have been times when a particularly heavy dose of such cynicism has caused me to reflect that surely this is the age and…

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The larger an English industry was, the more likely it was to go bankrupt, because the English were not naturally corporate people; they disliked working for others and they seemed to resent taking orders. On the whole, directors were treated absurdly well, and workers badly, and most industries were weakened by class suspicion and false economies and cynicism. But the…

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Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a…

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I think growing up in Indiana prepares anyone for a life in comedy. I do feel like there is a certain kind of self-effacing…

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“That's what I've never been able to get about religion: that charmless combination of altruism and insanity. Give me a cynical, self-interested bastard any…

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Nothing is more urgent than a serious, dare I say compassionate, debate as to where we are going at home and abroad. Technicians cannot master revolutions; every great achievement was an idea before it became a reality. Cathedrals cannot be built by those who are paralyzed by doubt or consumed by cynicism. If a society loses the capacity for great…

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