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.

Quote by Derek Walcott

Topics: Derek Walcott Quotes

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

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

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

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

This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human...

This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human...

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

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

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love...

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love...

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it...

Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it...

The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there...

The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there...

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with...

Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with...