Derek Walcott Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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
My race began as the sea began,
with no nouns, and with no horizon.

Derek Walcott
I going to bite them young ladies, partner,
like a hot dog or a hamburger
and if you thin, don't be in a fright
is only big fat women I going to bite.

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

Derek Walcott
These palms are greater than Versailles, for no man made them.

Derek Walcott
The tourist archipelagoes of my South
are prisons too, corruptible, and though
there is no harder prison than writing verse,
what's poetry, if it is worth its salt,
but a phrase men can pass from hand to mouth?

Derek Walcott
The worst crime is to leave a man's hands empty.
Men are born makers, with that primal simplicity
In every maker since Adam.

Derek Walcott
The peace of white horses,
The pastures of ports,
The litany of islands,
The rosary of archipelagoes.

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
I come from a backward place: your duty is supplied by life around you. One guy plants bananas; another plants cocoa; I'm a writer, I plant lines. There's the same clarity of occupation, and the sense of devotion.

Derek Walcott
The starved eye devours the seascape for the morsel
Of a sail.

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

Derek Walcott
Something inside is laid wide like a wound,
some open passage that has cleft the brain,
some deep, amnesiac blow. We left
somewhere a life we never found,
customs and gods that are not born again,
some crib, some grille of light
clanged shut on us in bondage, and withheld
us from that world below us and beyond,
and in its swaddling cerements we're still bound.

Derek Walcott
And O was the conch-shell's invocation, mer was
both mother and sea in our Antillean patois, os, a grey bone, and the white surf as it crashes.

Derek Walcott
Change lay in our silence. We had come to that bend
where the trees are warped by wind, and the cliffs, raw,
shelve surely to foam "Is right here everything end."

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 thought, who cares how many million starve? Their rising souls will lighten the world's weight and level its gull-glittering waterline.

Derek Walcott
Now I have come to where the phantoms live,
I have no fear of phantoms, but of the real.

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
Statistics justify and scholars seize The salients of colonial policy.

Derek Walcott
I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation.

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

Derek Walcott
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?

Derek Walcott
I am tired of words,
and literature is an old couch stuffed with fleas.

Derek Walcott
Poetry, which is perfection's sweat but which must seem as fresh as the raindrops on a statue's brow, combines the natural and the marmoreal.

Derek Walcott