53+ Derek Walcott Quotes On Friendship, Education And Death

Derek Walcott was a Trinidadian playwright and poet. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992 for his works exploring the Caribbean cultural heritage. Walcott's works are known for their lyricism and for their exploration of the Caribbean experience of colonialism and post-colonialism. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Derek Walcott on love, friendship, life.

Top 10 Derek Walcott Quotes

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor.
4. The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• The truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element.
• Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.
• I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don't work, I study the stars.
• The English language is nobody's special property.
• 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.
• Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.
• The poem is itself a mirror.
• Who cares about a kid from the Midwest writing pentameter? It's stupid.
• We read, we travel, we become.

Derek Walcott Quotes About Life

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

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. — Derek Walcott

To change your language you must change your life. — Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott Quotes About Poetry

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

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. — Derek Walcott

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

Derek Walcott Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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 — 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

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

The first thing we have to do is get rid of the pentameter. To ditch the pentameter. — Derek Walcott

You can't write drunk. — Derek Walcott

All of Victorian verse is pentameter. — Derek Walcott

The future happens. No matter how much we scream. — Derek Walcott

What are men? Children who doubt. — Derek Walcott

I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars. — Derek Walcott

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. — Derek Walcott

The thing that is believed is a reality. — Derek Walcott

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? — Derek Walcott

Time is the metre, memory the only plot. — Derek Walcott

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

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. — Derek Walcott

I read; I travel; I become — Derek Walcott

How can I turn from Africa and live? — Derek Walcott

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

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

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

The classics can console. But not enough. — Derek Walcott

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

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

The truth is that the poems are ecstatic. — Derek Walcott

There's always more to see. — Derek Walcott

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

Life Lessons by Derek Walcott

1. Derek Walcott teaches us that we can overcome our struggles and find our own unique voice through the power of creativity and art.
2. He encourages us to stay true to ourselves and strive for excellence in our craft, no matter how difficult the journey may be.
3. He also reminds us to stay humble, open-minded, and to embrace the beauty of our diverse cultures and backgrounds.