Caribbean culture is not evolving but already shaped. Its proportions are not to be measured by the traveller or the exile, but by its own citizenry and architecture. To be told you are not yet a city or a culture requires this response. I am not your city or your culture.

— Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott Quotes

Art is History’s nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.

— Derek Walcott

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

— 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

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

— Derek Walcott

In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.

— Derek Walcott

How can I turn from Africa and live?

— 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

The classics can console. But not enough.

— Derek Walcott

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

— Derek Walcott

I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars.

— Derek Walcott

The English language is nobody’s special property.

— Derek Walcott

I know when dark-haired evening put on her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh, that there’d be no rest, there’d be no forgetting. Is like telling mourners round the graveside about resurrection, they want the dead back.

— Derek Walcott

Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.

— Derek Walcott

She’s a rare vase, out of a cat’s reach, on its shelf.

— 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

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

For there is a time in the tide of the heart, when Arrived at its anchor of suffering, a grave Or a bed, despairing in action, we ask O God, where is our home?

— Derek Walcott

You want to hear my history? Ask the sea.

— Derek Walcott

Caribbean culture is not evolving but already shaped. Its proportions are not to be measured by the traveller or the exile, but by its own citizenry and architecture. To be told you are not yet a city or a culture requires this response. I am not your city or your culture.

— Derek Walcott

I should like to keep these simple joys inviolate, not because they are innocent, but because they are true.

— Derek Walcott
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