Derek Walcott Quotes - Page 2

When you get a class reciting some great poems, it'll tear your heart out.

We look and see what we see in a mirror, and we believe it. That's important, the question of belief. The question is: Should we believe what we see in a mirror?

The thing that is believed is a reality.

How can I turn from Africa and live?

The English language is nobody's special property.

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.

We read, we travel, we become.

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

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

The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves . . .

The poem is itself a mirror.

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

Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.

In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.

The classics can console. But not enough.

Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.

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.

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.

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

Americans are not brought up with meter. They're not brought up with poetry. If you try to get them to recite, they're too embarrassed.

Who cares about a kid from the Midwest writing pentameter? It's stupid.

When poems are no good they don't make any sense.

You can't write drunk.

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

I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars.