Derek Walcott Quotes

The classics can console. But not enough.

We read, we travel, we become.

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.

I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars.

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

The truth is that the poems are ecstatic.

Who cares about a kid from the Midwest writing pentameter? It's stupid.

The mirror is believed the way a poem is believed. It's believed because it's there.

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.

Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.

How can I turn from Africa and live?

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.

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.

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.

I look in the mirror. There's me. What's in the mirror is not real. So am I unreal?

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.

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

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

When you get a class reciting some great poems, it'll tear your heart out.

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

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

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.

The English language is nobody's special property.

I read; I travel; I become

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

The poem is itself a mirror.

In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.

The future happens. No matter how much we scream.

Time is the metre, memory the only plot.

There's always more to see.

The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves . . .

All of Victorian verse is pentameter.

The thing that is believed is a reality.

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

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

We look and see what we see in a mirror, and we believe it. That's important, the question of belief. The question is: Should we believe what we see in a mirror?

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

The first thing we have to do is get rid of the pentameter. To ditch the pentameter.

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

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

You can't write drunk.

Love After Love all your life, whom you have 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

What are men? Children who doubt.