Derek Walcott Quotes & Sayings

Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic. — Derek Walcott

I loved them as poets love the poetry
that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea. — Derek Walcott

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

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor, — Derek Walcott

... the truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element ... — Derek Walcott

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

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

I shall unlearn feeling,
unlearn my gift. That is greater
and harder than what passes there for life. — Derek Walcott

I read; I travel; I become — 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

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

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 future happens. No matter how much we scream. — Derek Walcott

I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars. — 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

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

In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent. — Derek Walcott

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

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

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

To change your language you must change your life. — Derek Walcott

Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind. — Derek Walcott

The classics can console. But not enough. — 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

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, "Well, what's the use of a cloud? What's the use of a river? What's the use of a tree?" They don't make anything happen. — 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

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

To set out for rehearsals in that quivering quarter-hour is to engage conclusions, not beginnings, for one walks past the guilded hallucinations of poverty with a corrupt resignation touched by details, as if the destitute, in their orange-tinted back yards, under their dusty trees, or climbing into their favelas, were all natural scene designers and poverty were not a condition but an art. Deprivation is made lyrical, and twilight, with the patience of alchemy, almost transmutes despair into virtue. In the tropics nothing is lovelier than the allotments of the poor, no theater is as vivid, voluble, and cheap. — Derek Walcott

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

What are men? Children who doubt. — Derek Walcott

How can I turn from Africa and live? — Derek Walcott

Time is the metre, memory the only plot. — Derek Walcott

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

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

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

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

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

We read, we travel, we become. — Derek Walcott