Derek Walcott Quotes (17 Quotes)


    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.

    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.

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

    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.

    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.


    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.

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

    This image of us as being art supportive and very cultured is false, ... The money that we have now that is keeping this place going has come from Canada-the University of Toronto. When you come across sponsors like these gentlemen we have today, what it does for the individual artist is enormous. It means that we can feel that there is some direction to our lives.

    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.

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

    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.

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

    I have always been fascinated by the musical talent, the calypso, the carnival and the sweet sound of pan, ... Trinidad was the best place to host the world premier and to display the vast local talent.

    To change your language you must change your life.

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


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