60 Glorious Selected Quotes By - Derek Walcott | Status Free Download
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| 60 Glorious Selected Quotes By - Derek Walcott |
60 Glorious Selected Quotes By - Derek Walcott | WhatsApp Status Free Download
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
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.
— Derek Walcott
I consider the sound of the sea to be part of my body.
— Derek Walcott
I'm from the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean in the Lesser Antilles, the lower part of the archipelago, which is a bilingual island - French, Creole, and English - but my education is in English.
— Derek Walcott
I have to live, socially, in an almost unfinished society. Among the almost great, among the almost true, among the almost honest. That allows me to describe the anguish.
— 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
For so long, the world has viewed West Indian culture as semiliterate and backward, which it is not. In my work, I have tried to give that world an exposure so the world can better understand it.
— Derek Walcott
I go back to St. Lucia, and the exhilaration I feel is not simply the exhilaration of homecoming and of nostalgia. It is almost an irritation of feeling: 'Well, you never got it right. Now you have another chance. Maybe you can try and look harder.'
— Derek Walcott
I feel blessed that I was gifted.
— Derek Walcott
There is no one more deserving of a place in Poets' Corner. Ted Hughes introduced a new kind of landscape into English poetry. The most compelling aspect of his work was his intimacy with nature.
— Derek Walcott
I don't want to write poems about the royal wedding. I would have to be moved by the event.
— Derek Walcott
My delight in things is definitely Caribbean. It has to do with landscape and food. The fact that my language may have a metrical direction is because that's the shape of the language. I didn't make that shape.
— Derek Walcott
Our artists and writers should not be forced like soldiers to die on foreign soil or to return wounded and crawl famously into a hole.
— Derek Walcott
The older I get, the more aware I am of the banality and indifference of a place like Trinidad to any development of the arts.
— Derek Walcott
My family background really only consists of my mother. She was a widow. My father died quite young; he must have been thirty-one. Then there was my twin brother and my sister. We had two aunts as well, my father's sisters. But the immediate family consisted of my mother, my brother, my sister, and me.
— Derek Walcott
I hate all that nonsense about not touching the colonialists' language. All that about it being corrupting and belonging to the master and making you Caliban. That thinking just denies you an outlet. You deny everything that is great from a language, whether it is Conrad or Shakespeare.
— Derek Walcott
I always knew that was what I wanted to do - to write, particularly poetry.
— Derek Walcott
The discontent that lies in the human condition is not satisfied simply by material things.
— Derek Walcott
Minor writers think style is all.
— Derek Walcott
Look at Allen Ginsberg. In poems like 'Kaddish' and 'Howl,' you can hear a cantor between the lines. It's fully alive, and I think that's what's missing in modern poetry. It's too dry and cerebral.
— Derek Walcott
A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.
— 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
I think young writers ought to be heretical.
— Derek Walcott
The painter I really thought I could learn from was Cezanne - some sort of resemblance to oranges and greens and browns of the dry season in St. Lucia.
— Derek Walcott
I don't think poetry has a readership anywhere, really, that's that big.
— Derek Walcott
How does a poet teach himself or herself? I think chiefly by imitation, chiefly by practising it as a deliberate technical exercise often. Translation, imitation, those were my methods anyway.
— Derek Walcott
I am not defined as a black writer in the Caribbean, but as soon as I go to America or the U.K., my place becomes black theatre. It's a little ridiculous.
— Derek Walcott
I knew very early what I wanted to do, and I considered myself lucky to know that's what I wanted, even in a place like Saint Lucia where there was no publishing house and no theatre.
— Derek Walcott
There are some things people avoid saying in interviews because they sound pompous or sentimental or too mystical.
— Derek Walcott
When a child's mind develops and is heading in a certain direction, we murder that mentality, we murder that imagination, by saying, 'Now, that is all well and good, but now sit down and start to study.'
— Derek Walcott
Miscegenation is not an idea that we would have in the Caribbean. It wouldn't come up because anybody could marry anybody, you know. I'm not saying that there aren't prejudices in the Caribbean, but the idea of the word 'miscegenation' is not something that we think of.
— 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
If music goes out of language, then you are in bad trouble.
— Derek Walcott
All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory: every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase.
— Derek Walcott
There is a force of exultation, a celebration of luck, when a writer finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture that is defining itself, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, in that self-defining dawn, which is why, especially at the edge of the sea, it is good to make a ritual of the sunrise.
— Derek Walcott
Rhyme is an attempt to reassemble and reaffirm the possibility of paradise. There is a wholeness, a serenity, in sounds coupling to form a memory.
— Derek Walcott
A noun is not a name you give something. It is something you watch becoming itself, and you have to have the patience to find out what it is.
— Derek Walcott
I am grateful, you know. I have to be grateful in the sense that I feel that what I have is a gift.
— Derek Walcott
The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.
— Derek Walcott
There's always a need at a critical time for poetry.
— Derek Walcott
I don't believe that poetry is in danger because nobody wants to read it or appreciate it. There is a tremendous audience for it on any given day or night. You just have to know where to look.
— Derek Walcott
The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world.
— Derek Walcott
What is taught in schools generally in the West Indies is that if something is your thing, it's better than anybody else's because it's yours. It's extremely provincial and also damaging. You prevent people from learning things. The biggest absurdity would be, 'Don't read Shakespeare because he was white.'
— Derek Walcott
Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next.
— Derek Walcott
If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
— 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
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 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
We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.
— Derek Walcott
This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo.
— Derek Walcott
Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven.
— Derek Walcott
My mother, who is nearly ninety now, still talks continually about my father. All my life, I've been aware of her grief about his absence and her strong pride in his conduct.
— Derek Walcott
A fisherman, say, working on a beach doing his job, may be photographed by a tourist because it's photogenic to see him working, and the Caribbean is extremely photogenic, so poverty is photogenic, and a lot of people are photographed in their poverty, and sometimes it's kind of exploited.
— Derek Walcott
My dedication to trying to be a poet started very, very young, and I was very well encouraged by good teachers and by older friends and so on, so I think it is a benediction, and I also think it is a calling, a duty.
— Derek Walcott
I made a vow that I wouldn't be tempted by what could happen to me if I went to Europe. I thought, 'You could be absorbed in it - it's so seductive, you might lose your own search for identity.' Then, when I did finally go to Europe, I was able to resist it because I had established my own identity.
— Derek Walcott
The country that I was coming from, the island I was in, hadn't been written about, really. So I thought that I virtually had it all to myself, including the language that was spoken there, which was a French Creole, and a landscape that is not recorded, really, and the people.
— Derek Walcott
Individual writers have different postures, different stances, even different physical attitudes as they stand or sit over their blank paper, and in a sense, without doing it, they are crossing themselves; I mean, it's like the habit of Catholics going into water: you cross yourself before you go in.
— Derek Walcott
That's another pompous expression that is out of fashion, to say that poetry is a gift. It sounds pompous because you say, 'Who gave you the gift, and what is this gift?' And the gift is where I am; the gift is what I have come out of, the people around me who, I think, are beautiful people.
— Derek Walcott
Ted Hughes is dead. That's a fact, OK. Then there's something called the poetry of Ted Hughes. The poetry of Ted Hughes is more real, very soon, than the myth that Ted Hughes existed - because that can't be proven.
— Derek Walcott
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