Derek Walcott Quotes

#1. Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.

Derek Walcott

#2. We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.

Derek Walcott

#3. To change your language you must change your life.

Derek Walcott

#4. She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf.

Derek Walcott

#5. I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don't work, I study the stars.

Derek Walcott

#6. 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

#7. I loved them as poets love the poetry
that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea.

Derek Walcott

#8. Time is the metre, memory the only plot.

Derek Walcott

#9. The classics can console. But not enough.

Derek Walcott

#10. A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

Derek Walcott

#11. The future happens. No matter how much we scream.

Derek Walcott

#12. Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.

Derek Walcott

#13. How can I turn from Africa and live?

Derek Walcott

#14. If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

Derek Walcott

#15. 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

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

Derek Walcott

#17. I know when dark-haired evening put on her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh, that there'd be no rest, there'd be no forgetting. Is like telling mourners round the graveside about resurrection, they want the dead back.

Derek Walcott

#18. The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself.

Derek Walcott

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.

Derek Walcott

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

Derek Walcott

#23. What are men? Children who doubt.

Derek Walcott

#24. For every poet it is always morning in the world; history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history.

Derek Walcott

#25. I read; I travel; I become

Derek Walcott

#26. This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo.

Derek Walcott

#27. 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

#28. I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars.

Derek Walcott

#29. 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

#30. ... the truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element ...

Derek Walcott

#31. I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.

Derek Walcott

#32. 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

#33. and the frayed earth, crisscrossed like old bagasse, spring to a cushiony quilt of emerald grass, and who does sew and sow and patch the land?

Derek Walcott

#34. Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor,

Derek Walcott

#35. 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.

Derek Walcott

#36. 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

#37. Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven.

Derek Walcott

#38. We read, we travel, we become.

Derek Walcott

#39. 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

#40. In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.

Derek Walcott