Quotes from Derek Walcott

My body's urge is to be in a pair of shorts, working and going down to the beach.

I think I would have been a totally different kind of writer if I'd gone to England. I might have developed a cynicism about my origins, a belittling of them, or an excessive nostalgia for them.

I was writing from a very, very early age. My father used to write. He died early, and my mother was a schoolteacher, so my academic background from childhood is a strong one, a good one.

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.

I read, I travel, I become

The future happens, no matter how much we scream.

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.

Caribbean culture is not evolving but already shaped. Its proportions are not to be measured by the traveller or the exile, but by its own citizenry and architecture. To be told you are not yet a city or a culture requires this response. I am not your city or your culture.

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

For there is a time in the tide of the heart, when Arrived at its anchor of suffering, a grave Or a bed, despairing in action, we ask O God, where is our home?

These are the days when, however simple the future, we do not go towards it but leave part of life in a lobby whose elevators divide and enclose us, brightening digits that show exactly where we are headed, while a young Polish woman is emptying an ashtray, and we are drawn to a window whose strings, if we pull them, widen an emptiness.

Let them run ahead. Then I'll have good reason for shooting them down. Sharpeville? Attempting to escape. Attempting to escape from the prison of their lives. That's the most dangerous crime. It brings about revolution. So, off we go, lads!

I should like to keep these simple joys inviolate, not because they are innocent, but because they are true

The fist clenched round my heart loosens a little, and I gasp brightness; but it tightens again. When have I ever not loved the pain of love? But this has moved past love to mania. This has the strong clench of the madman, this is gripping the ledge of unreason, before plunging howling into the abyss. Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.

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.

The second Adam since the fall His germinal Corruption held the seed Of that congenital heresy that men fail According to their creed. Craftsman and castaway All heaven in his head, He watched his shadow pray Not for God's love but human love instead.

You want to hear my history? Ask the sea.

Every word I have written took the wrong approach. I

Why couldn't they love the place, same way, together, the way he always loved her, even with his sore? Love Helen like a wife in good and bad weather, in sickness and in health, its beauty in being poor? The way the leaves loved her, not like a pink leaflet printed with slogans of black people fighting war?

and the frayed earth, crisscrossed like old bagasse, spring to a cushiony quilt of emerald grass, and who does sew and sow and patch the land?

and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation

I am the man my father loved and was.

It is not that History is obliterated by this sunrise. It is there in Antillean geography, in the vegetation itself. The sea sighs with the drowned from the Middle Passage, the butchery of its aborigines, Carib and Aruac and Taino, bleeds in the scarlet of the immortelle, and even the actions of surf on sand cannot erase the African memory, or the lances of cane as a green prison where indentured Asians, the ancestors of Felicity, are still serving time.

That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase.