Derek Walcott Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor,”
-- 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 culture, we all know, is made by its cities.”
-- Derek Walcott -
“If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.”
-- Derek Walcott -
“Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.”
-- Derek Walcott -
“I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.”
-- Derek Walcott -
“To change your language you must change your life.”
-- Derek Walcott -
“… the truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element…”
-- 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 at the other’s welcome.”
-- Derek Walcott -
“I come from a place that likes grandeur; it likes large gestures; it is not inhibited by flourish; it is a rhetorical society; it is a society of physical performance; it is a society of style.”
-- Derek Walcott -
“The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.”
-- Derek Walcott -
“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 of sugar estates and abandoned forts.”
-- Derek Walcott -
“I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don't work, I study the stars.”
-- Derek Walcott -
“Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe ... I don't think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.”
-- 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 whole.”
-- Derek Walcott -
“Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.”
-- Derek Walcott -
“Love After Love 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 all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.”
-- Derek Walcott -
“The classics can console. But not enough.”
-- Derek Walcott -
“The English language is nobody's special property.”
-- Derek Walcott -
“I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars.”
-- Derek Walcott -
“We read, we travel, we become.”
-- Derek Walcott -
“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, a waking island.”
-- Derek Walcott -
“The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves . . .”
-- Derek Walcott -
“The future happens. No matter how much we scream.”
-- Derek Walcott -
“Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.”
-- Derek Walcott -
“Slowly my body grows a single sound, slowly I become a bell, an oval, disembodied vowel, I grow, an owl, an aureole, white fire poesia "Metamorfosi, I. Luna”
-- Derek Walcott -
“She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.”
-- Derek Walcott -
“We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.”
-- Derek Walcott
