Derek Walcott Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

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
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.

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

Derek Walcott
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?

Derek Walcott
The Caribbean was borne like an elliptical basin in the hands of acolytes, and a people were absolved of a history which they did not commit.

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
Adam had an idea.
He and the snake would share
the loss of Eden for a profit.
So both made the New World. And it looked good.

Derek Walcott
To curse your birthplace is the final evil.

Derek Walcott
You spit on your people,
your people applaud,
your former oppressors
laurel you.
The thorns biting your forehead
are contempt
disguised as concern,
still, you can come home, now.
To exiled novelists

Derek Walcott
Famine sighs like a scythe
across the field of statistics and the desert
is a moving mouth. In the hold of this earth
10,000,000 shoreless souls are drifting.
Somalia: 765,000, their skeletons will go under the tidal sand.

Derek Walcott
Then after Eden, was there no surprise?
O yes, the awe of Adam at the first bead of sweat.

Derek Walcott