Derek Walcott Quotes

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.

The future happens. No matter how much we scream.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.

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.

There's always more to see.

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.

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.

I read; I travel; I become

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

Time is the metre, memory the only plot.

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

To change your language you must change your life.

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

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

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

What are men? Children who doubt.

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

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

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.