Derek Walcott Quotes

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.

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.

I read; I travel; I become

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.

The future happens. No matter how much we scream.

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

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

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

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.

What are men? Children who doubt.