Derek Walcott Quotes

• The process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery.

  Derek Walcott

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• The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History.

  Derek Walcott

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• Poetry…is perfection’s sweat but most seen as fresh as the raindrops on a statue’s brow.

  Derek Walcott

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

  Derek Walcott

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• The worst crime is to leave a man’s hands empty. Men are born makers, with that primal simplicity in every maker since Adam.

  Derek Walcott

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• ‘We were the colour of shadows when we came down with tinkling leg-irons to join the chains of the sea, for the silver coins multiplying on the sold horizon.’

  Derek Walcott

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• Time is the metre, memory the only plot.

  Derek Walcott

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• I see these islands and I feel to bawl, ‘area of darkness’ with V.S. Nightfall.

  Derek Walcott

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• But we live like our names and you would have to be colonial to know the difference, to know the pain of history words contain.

  Derek Walcott

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• Who knows who his grandfather is, much less his name?

  Derek Walcott

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• 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

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• 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? How can I face such slaughter and be cool? How can I turn from Africa and live?

  Derek Walcott

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

  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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

  Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott (24)

Birth:	22nd January, 1930
Nationality:	Trinidadian
Profession:	Poet, Professor, Playwriter

About

Derek Alton Walcott is a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is currently Professor of poetry at the University of Essex.

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Today's Anniversary - 25th April

Births

• 1930 - Paul Mazursky
• 1946 - Talia Shire
• 1599 - Oliver Cromwell
• 1873 - Walter de la Mare
• 1976 - Tim Duncan

Deaths

• 1840 - Simeon Poisson
• 1595 - Torquato Tasso
• 2010 - Alan Sillitoe
• 2004 - Thom Gunn
• 1998 - Konstantinos Karamanlis