Quotes from Derek Walcott

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

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

The tourist archipelagoes of my Southare prisons too, corruptible, and thoughthere is no harder prison than writing verse,what's poetry, if it is worth its salt,but a phrase men can pass from hand to mouth?

These palms are greater than Versailles,for no man made them.

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

The Caribbean was borne like an elliptical basinin the hands of acolytes, and a people were absolvedof a history which they did not commit.

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.

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…

What are men? Children who doubt.

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 classics can console. But not enough.

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.

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

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

I loved them as poets love the poetry that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea.

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 shall unlearn feeling, unlearn my gift. That is greater and harder than what passes there for life.

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

I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars.

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor, for the eternal idleness of the imagined return, for rare flutes and bare feet, and the August bedroom of tangled sheets.

There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery. Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries and dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, universities, political dogma, the diction of institutions. Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main.

what I preferred was not statues but the bird in the statue's hair.

Today is Thursday, Vallejo is dying, but come, girl, get your raincoat, let's look for life in some cafe behind tear-streaked windows, perhaps the fin de siecle isn't really finished, maybe there's a piano playing it somewhere