Derek Walcott quotes

Derek Walcott was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright, celebrated for his rich and evocative works blending Caribbean heritage with classical themes. His poetry, most notably the epic "Omeros", explores identity, history, and postcolonial experience. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature and remains a towering figure in world literature. Here are 24 of his quotes:

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 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

The future happens. No matter how much we scream.

Derek Walcott

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

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

Derek Walcott

What are men? Children who doubt.

Derek Walcott

... the truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element...

Derek Walcott

I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don't work, I study the stars.

Derek Walcott

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

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

Derek Walcott

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

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.

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

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 belives in liberty. And if it is wrong to be liberal, then the other side has to be facist.

Derek Walcott

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

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

Derek Walcott

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.

Derek Walcott

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

Derek Walcott

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

Derek Walcott

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

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