Derek Walcott Quotes

Derek Walcott shares grand, lyrical thoughts on action and language that feel both bold and artistic.

17 quotes

1. Adios, Carenage line 40-44 (The Schooner 'Flight' (1980))

2. After the Storm (The Schooner 'Flight' (1980))

3. 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.

4. Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.

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

6. If you talk about language in the Caribbean, you must relate it to history.

7. 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.

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

9. I don't feel I've arrived home until I get on the beach. All my life, the theater of the sea has been a very strong thing.

10. The greatest writers have been, at heart, parochial, provincial in their rootedness.

11. 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, and say, sit here. Eat. 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. 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.

12. 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.

13. My mother, who is nearly ninety now, still talks continually about my father. All my life, I've been aware of her grief about his absence and her strong pride in his conduct.

14. My family background really only consists of my mother. She was a widow. My father died quite young; he must have been thirty-one. Then there was my twin brother and my sister. We had two aunts as well, my father's sisters. But the immediate family consisted of my mother, my brother, my sister, and me.

15. Like any art, what is the most imprisoning thing is also the most delivering thing. If an actor knows he only has 12 syllables in a line, the challenge is, 'How can I interpret the meaning and contain it without going one syllable over?'

16. The thing that is believed is a reality.

17. The history of the world - by which, of course, we mean Europe - is a record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic cleansings.