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Derek Walcott
18 quotes
“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.”
Derek Walcott (1930–2017) first seen 1990 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas are Born (Penguin, 1990), pp. 176
“The violence of beast on beast is read As natural law, but upright man Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.”
Derek Walcott (1930–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1930–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don't work, I study the stars.”
Derek Walcott (1930–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Derek Walcott (1930–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.”
Derek Walcott (1930–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No masterpieces in huge frames to worship, … and yet there are the days when every street corner rounds itself into a sunlit surprise, a painting or a phrase, canoes drawn up by the market, the harbour’s blue, the barracks. So much to do still, all of it praise.”
Derek Walcott (1930–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.”
Derek Walcott (1930–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1930–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (1930–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“you can't separate your growth from your soil. (1968)”
Derek Walcott (1930–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't read poetry for pleasure. I read to be terrified in a way. And people who terrify me from their size and the grandeur of their imagination now are people like Pasternak and Neruda, a lot of Latin-American poets, Lowell - very few English poets - Ted Hughes a little...very few English poets now in fact (1968)”
Derek Walcott (1930–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have always believed in fierce, devoted apprenticeship... I have always tried to keep my mind Gothic in its devotions to the concept of master and apprentice. The old masters made new masters by the discipline of severity. One's own voice is an anthology of all the sounds one has heard. As it is with children, so with poets. (1983)”
Derek Walcott (1930–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I do not consider English to be the language of my masters. I consider language to be my birthright. I happen to have been born in an English and a Creole place, and love both languages. It is the passion, futility and industry of critics to perpetuate this ambiguity. It is their profession. It is mine to do what other poets before me did, Dante, Chaucer, Villon, Burns, which is to fuse the noble and the common language, the streets and the law courts, in a tone that is true to my own voice, in which both accents are heard naturally. (1983)”
Derek Walcott (1930–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I never thought I would see the day when America (which is based on the idea of liberty, from which the world Liberal comes) would become so self-centered and hypocritical. I mean if democracy considers liberal to be a term of abuse, then we should be terrified. A liberal is someone who believes in liberty. And if it is wrong to be liberal, then the other side has to be fascist. (1987)”
Derek Walcott (1930–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People who are offering revenge, they are just an enemy. But when you offer peace and love, that infuriates people. And you get killed for that. That's why Christ is killed, that's why King is shot, that's why Gandhi is killed. The idea of a man believing in the universal brotherhood is totally unendurable to someone who would prefer to have that man talk about revenge. (1990)”
Derek Walcott (1930–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Caribbean creativity is phenomenal. It is an astonishing phenomenon. The kind of writing that has been produced in these islands is such elaborate work. It was inevitable historically and culturally. But it is still as astonishing. Now you're talking about writers of equality, of Jean Rhys, Saint-John Perse, Aimé Césaire, V. S. Naipaul. And these people are different colors and different races. (1990)”
Derek Walcott (1930–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Then silence is sawn in half by a dragonfly as eels sign their names along the bottom-sand when the sunrise brightens the river's memory and waves of huge ferns are nodding to the sea's sound. Although the smoke forgets the earth from which is ascends and the nettles guard the holes where the laurels were killed an iguana hears the axes, clouding each lens over its lost name, when the hunched island was called 'Iounalao' 'Where it iguana is from' But, taking its own time, the iguana will scale the rigging of vines in a year, its dewlap fanned, its elbows akimbo, its deliberate tail moving with the island. The slit pods of its eyes ripened in a pause that lasted for centuries, that rose with the Aruacs' smoke till a new race unknown to the lizard stood measuring the trees. These were their pillars that fell, leaving a blue space for a single God where the old gods stood before, The first god was a gommier. The generator began with a whine, and a shark, with sidewise jaw, sent the chips flying like mackrel over water into trembling weeds”
Derek Walcott (1930–2017) said by 2017 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source