Derek Walcott Quotes

"Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic."
- Derek Walcott

"A culture, we all know, is made by its cities."
- Derek Walcott
(Related: Cities, Culture)

"Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven."
- Derek Walcott
(Related: Heaven, World, Writer)

"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
(Related: Love)

"If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average."
- Derek Walcott
(Related: Writing)

"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
(Related: God, Body, Memory)

"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
(Related: Biography, Body, Luck, Sound, Vocabulary, Waking, Walking)

"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
(Related: Athens, Echo, May, Spain)

"Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves."
- Derek Walcott
(Related: History, Beauty)

"We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past."
- Derek Walcott
(Related: Past)

"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
(Related: English, Language, Property)