Derek Walcott Quotes

Love After Love 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. ~ Derek Walcott

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! ~ Derek Walcott

I read; I travel; I become ~ Derek Walcott

The voice does go up in a poem. It is an address, even if it is to oneself. ~ Derek Walcott

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

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. ~ Derek Walcott

Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor, ~ Derek Walcott

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

A Far Cry From Africa

A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
"Waste no compassion on these separate dead!"
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?

Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilization's dawn
From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still that native dread
Of the white peace contracted by the dead.

Again brutish necessity wipes its hands
Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again
A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,
The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool ~ Derek Walcott

She's a rare vase, out of a cat's reach, on its shelf. ~ Derek Walcott

I loved them as poets love the poetry
that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea. ~ 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

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? ~ Derek Walcott

In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent. ~ Derek Walcott

The future happens. No matter how much we scream. ~ Derek Walcott

I'm fond of Derek Walcott too. I could eat his poem "Love After Love." Just peel the words off the page and stuff them in my mouth. ~ Cath Crowley

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that gray vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is History.

First, there was the heaving oil,
heavy as chaos;
then, likea light at the end of a tunnel,

the lantern of a caravel,
and that was Genesis.
Then there were the packed cries,
the shit, the moaning:

Exodus.
Bone soldered by coral to bone,
mosaics
mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow,

that was the Ark of the Covenant.
Then came from the plucked wires
of sunlight on the sea floor

the plangent harp of the Babylonian bondage,
as the white cowries clustered like manacles
on the drowned women,

and those were the ivory bracelets
of the Song of Solomon,
but the ocean kept turning blank pages

looking for History.
Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors
who sank without tombs,

brigands who barbecued cattle,
leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,
then the foaming, rabid maw

of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,
and that was Jonah,
but where is your Renaissance?

Sir, it is locked in them sea sands
out there past the reef's moiling shelf,
where the men-o'-war floated down;

strop on these goggles, I'll guide you there myself.
It's all subtle and sub ~ 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

There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery. Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries and dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, universities, political dogma, the diction of institutions. Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main. ~ Derek Walcott

what I preferred
was not statues but the bird in the statue's hair. ~ Derek Walcott

Slowly my body grows a single sound, slowly I become a bell, an oval, disembodied vowel, I grow, an owl, an aureole, white fire
poesia Metamorfosi, I. Luna ~ Derek Walcott

In the Village

III

Who has removed the typewriter from my desk,
so that I am a musician without his piano
with emptiness ahead as clear and grotesque
as another spring? My veins bud, and I am so
full of poems, a wastebasket of black wire.
The notes outside are visible; sparrows will
line antennae like staves, the way springs were,
but the roofs are cold and the great grey river
where a liner glides, huge as a winter hill,
moves imperceptibly like the accumulating
years. I have no reason to forgive her
for what I brought on myself. I am past hating,
past the longing for Italy where blowing snow
absolves and whitens a kneeling mountain range
outside Milan. Through glass, I am waiting
for the sound of a bird to unhinge the beginning
of spring, but my hands, my work, feel strange
without the rusty music of my machine. No words
for the Arctic liner moving down the Hudson, for the mange
of old snow moulting from the roofs. No poems. No birds. ~ Derek Walcott

To change your language you must change your life. ~ Derek Walcott

For every poet it is always morning in the world; history a forgotten, insomniac night. The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history. ~ Derek Walcott

Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven. ~ Derek Walcott

To set out for rehearsals in that quivering quarter-hour is to engage conclusions, not beginnings, for one walks past the guilded hallucinations of poverty with a corrupt resignation touched by details, as if the destitute, in their orange-tinted back yards, under their dusty trees, or climbing into their favelas, were all natural scene designers and poverty were not a condition but an art. Deprivation is made lyrical, and twilight, with the patience of alchemy, almost transmutes despair into virtue. In the tropics nothing is lovelier than the allotments of the poor, no theater is as vivid, voluble, and cheap. ~ Derek Walcott

Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind. ~ 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

I shall unlearn feeling,
unlearn my gift. That is greater
and harder than what passes there for life. ~ Derek Walcott

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

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

The word and the shadow of the word / makes a thing both itself and something else / till we are metaphors and not ourselves ... ~ Derek Walcott

The classics can console. But not enough. ~ Derek Walcott

[On Love After Love by Derek Walcott]
I read this poem often, once a month at least. In the madness and mayhem of modern life, where every man seems committed to an endless search for the approval and esteem of his fellows and peers, no matter what the cost, this poem reminds me of a basic truth: that we are, as we are, "enough". Most of us are motivated deep down by a sense of insufficiency, a need to be better stronger, faster; to work harder; to be more committed, more kind, more self-sufficient, more successful. But this short poem by Derek Walcott is like a declaration of unconditional love. It's like the embrace of an old friend. He brings us to an awareness of the present moment, calm and peaceful, and to a feeling of gratitude for everything we have. I have read it to my dearest friends after dinner once, and to my family at Christmas, and they started crying, which always, unfailingly, makes me cry. ~ Tom Hiddleston

Time is the metre, memory the only plot. ~ 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

I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars. ~ Derek Walcott

There's this great line in the song "Corner of the Sky": "Don't you see I want my life to be something more than long?" I can relate. I want to leave my footprint on this world in a positive, meaningful way. ~ Derek Hough

The "joy of discovery" is one of the fundamental joys of play itself. Not just the joy of discovering secrets within the game, but also the joy of uncovering the creator's vision. It's that "Aha!" moment where it all makes sense, and behind the world the player can feel the touch of another creative mind. In order for it to be truly joyful, however, it must remain hidden from plain view - not carved as commandments into stone tablets but revealed, piece by piece, through the player's exploration of the game's rules. ~ Derek Yu

Make exercising fun.

The same old routine at the gym can be a drag. It's good to mix it up. In addition to dancing I also enjoy hiking and swimming. And when you work out, do it someplace you find inspiring: a hike that brings you to a gorgeous view or a workout in the sand with the surf in your sight, even a small grassy spot in your backyard or a serene, uncluttered corner of your apartment. Recreational team sports also add variety to the mix: they put the focus on the fun of the game rather than the pain of the effort. ~ Derek Hough

When I first dropped into L.A., I wanted to be a superhero! ~ Derek Theler

Which college?'
'Hmm?'
'Which college do you go to?'
Fletcher nodded. 'Yes.'
'I'm sorry?'
'Oh,' Fletcher said, and laughed.
Valkyrie's parents looked at Fletcher in near bewilderment. Fletcher looked back at them in total bewilderment. Valkyrie shook her head. ~ Derek Landy

Oh my god you're thicker than you look ~ Derek Landy

You can't wait for the perfect moment. You need to make it. Take the happiness you can have now and fuck everything else. ~ Veronica Del Rosa

Nicholas Parsons' time at the University of Glasgow seems to be absolutely shrouded in mystery. ~ Derek Nimmo

If you don't see me in five minutes, then I've probably died a brave and heroic death. ~ Derek Landy

When you make a company, you make a utopia. It's where you design your perfect world. ~ Derek Sivers

He said he was Lord Vile. - Skulduggery ~ Derek Landy

I didn't say a word but stared
At Derek, still a little hazed.
He stared back, uncertain, scared,
Still unbelieving and amazed. ~ Tatyana K. Varenko

And I won't be needing a sword to kill you." He strode towards Skulduggery, who raised his hand. "Um, since you're not going to be using it, can I? ~ Derek Landy

The ability of a country to wage war is not an accurate measure of its strengths, but of its fears. ~ Derek R. Audette

What to do with life? Get out of bed, Derek. That's what you do. You get out of bed, and you get yourself a cup of fucking coffee. That's all you can do. ~ Allie Burke

Elizabeth Taylor has reinvented herself and her image time and time again. The results have often helped redefine modern fashion. ~ Bo Derek

Besides Camden and Derek, there were two lacrosse guys, Brad Slater and Dave Markley, which meant that the combined I.Q. of the table was probably . . . four. ~ Cherry Cheva

I love that sometimes we need to go to the opposite side of the world to realize assumptions that we didn't even know we had and realize that the opposite may also be true. ~ Derek Sivers

She saw Derek and without so much as a hello, leaned to look behind him. "Where's Simon?"
"He's - "
"Is he okay? Why isn't he here?" She glared up at Derek. "Where'd you leave him?"
"Passed out in an alley." Derek frowned in thought. "Not sure where, though ... "
"He's kidding," I said as Tori sputtered.
"We need to get moving." Derek hooked a thumb as Tori while looking at me. " She's your responsibility."
"Excuse me?" Tori said.
Derek didn't even glance her way. "Make sure she keeps up. And shuts up." ~ Kelley Armstrong

I think, a lot of times, players get in trouble when they're asked questions and they think they have to find a way to answer it. If you ask me a question and I say, 'I don't know,' there's really no follow-up. ~ Derek Jeter

You look angry," he said.
"You put me on hold."
"For a very good reason."
"You put me," she said very, very slowly, "on hold. ~ Derek Landy

When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws. ~ Derek Sivers

We might neglect our future selves because of some failure of belief or imagination. ~ Derek Parfit

We have this idea for a 'Where's Wally' type thing, except in ours, you'd have to find the one living person hiding in among all the dismembered corpses while the chainsaw-wielding killer hunts him down. You know, for kids. - Donegan ~ Derek Landy

I actually lost 90 pounds over the course of 15 months in order to save money on life insurance. ~ Derek Kilmer

What is it?' Stephanie whispered.
'That, my dear Valkyrie, is what we call a monster.'
She looked at Skulduggery. 'You don't know what it is, do you?'
'I told you what it is, it's a horrible monster. Now shut up before it comes over here and eats us. ~ Derek Landy

Look, this is all very, very weird. Why are you focusing on rumours and urban legends? You haven't even asked me any
normal questions."
"Normal questions? Like what?"
"Like, I don't know, like if Lynch had any enemies."
"Did Lynch have any enemies?"
"Well, not that I know of, no."
"Then there really was no point in me asking that, was there? Unless you wanted to distract me. You didn't want to distract me, did you, Kenny?"
"No, that's not - "
"Are you playing a game with me, Kenny?"
"I don't know what you're - "
Inspector Me leaned forward. "Did you kill him?"
"No!"
"It'd be OK if you did."
Kenny recoiled, horrified. "How would that be OK?"
"Well," Me said, "maybe not ~ Derek Landy

Doesn't sunlight kill them? Doesn't it turn them to dust, or make them burst into flames or something?"
"Nope. Vampires tan, just like you and me. Well, just like you. I tend to bleach. ~ Derek Landy

Undeniably, the audience for improvisation, good or bad, active or passive, sympathetic or hostile, has a power that no other audience has. It can affect the creation of that which is being witnessed. And perhaps because of that possibility the audience for improvisation has a degree of intimacy with the music that is not achieved in any other situation. ~ Derek Bailey

His hair is huge! ... Look! ... It's just sticking up at odd angles! Like a demented porcupine! - Desmond, about Fletcher's hair ~ Derek Landy

I do not like to call myself a Liberal, because there is so much that is wrong with liberalism. I also do not like to call my a Conservative for exactly the same reason. The fact that the theater of conservativism today seems to be such a haven for such an abundance of small minded, non-thinking, irrationalists is however making it very difficult for me to not adopt a harder stance. ~ Derek R. Audette