Best 40 quotes of Derek Walcott on MyQuotes

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.

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

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

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.

Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.

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.

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.

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.

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

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

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.

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

In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.

I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.

The classics can console. But not enough.

The English language is nobody's special property.

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

The future happens. No matter how much we scream.

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.

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.

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

The truth is that the poems are ecstatic.

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

Time is the metre, memory the only plot.

To change your language you must change your life.

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

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

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

But drunkenly, or secretly, we swore, Disciples of that astigmatic saint, That we would never leave the island Until we had put down, in paint, in words, As palmists learn the network of a hand, All of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines, Every neglected, self-pitying inlet Muttering in brackish dialect, the ropes of mangroves From which old soldier crabs slipped Surrendering to slush, Each ochre track seeking some hilltop and Losing itself in an unfinished phrase, Under sand shipyards where the burnt-out palms Inverted the design of unrigged schooners, Entering forests, boiling with life, Goyave, corrosol, bois-canot, sapotille. Days! The sun drumming, drumming, Past the defeated pennons of the palms, Roads limp from sunstroke, Past green flutes of the grass The ocean cannonading, come! Wonder that opened like the fan Of the dividing fronds On some noon-struck sahara, Where my heart from its rib cage yelped like a pup After clouds of sanderlings rustily wheeling The world on its ancient, Invisible axis, The breakers slow-dolphining over more breakers, To swivel our easels down, as firm As conquerors who had discovered home.

History was fact, History was a cannon, not a lizard; De Grasse leaving Martinique, and Rodney crouching to act in the right wind. Iounalo, my royal arse! Hewanorra, my hole! Was the greatest battle in naval history, which put the French to rout, fought for a creature with a disposable tail and elbows like a goalie?

I do not live in you, I bear my house inside me, everywhere until your winters grow more kind by the dancing firelight of mind where knobs of brass do not exist whose doors dissolve in tenderness House that lets in, at last, those fears that are its guests, to sit on chairs feasts on their human faces, and takes pity simply by the hand shows her her room, and feels the hum of wood and brick becoming home.

Who is the man who can speak to the strong? Where is the fool who can talk to the wise? Men who are dead now have learnt this long, Bitter is wisdom that fails when it tries.

Who with the Devil tries to play fair, weaves the net of his own despair. Oh, smile; what’s a house between drunkards?