13 Quotes & Sayings By Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott is a poet and playwright, and professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. For his body of work, he has won major international literary prizes, including the Commonwealth Award for Literature (1991), the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1999), the Griffin Poetry Prize (2002), and the Heinrich Heine Prize (2002). In 2004, he was named Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II Read more

He lives in Kingston, Jamaica.

Who is the man who can speak to the strong?...
1
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
Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments...
2
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. Derek Walcott
3
But drunkenly, or secretly, we swore, Disciples of that astigmatic saint, That we would never leave the island Until we had put down, in paint, in words, As palmists learn the network of a hand, All of its sunken, leaf-choked ravines, Every neglected, self-pitying inlet Muttering in brackish dialect, the ropes of mangroves From which old soldier crabs slipped Surrendering to slush, Each ochre track seeking some hilltop and Losing itself in an unfinished phrase, Under sand shipyards where the burnt-out palms Inverted the design of unrigged schooners, Entering forests, boiling with life, Goyave, corrosol, bois-canot, sapotille. Days! The sun drumming, drumming, Past the defeated pennons of the palms, Roads limp from sunstroke, Past green flutes of the grass The ocean cannonading, come! Wonder that opened like the fan Of the dividing fronds On some noon-struck sahara, Where my heart from its rib cage yelped like a pup After clouds of sanderlings rustily wheeling The world on its ancient, Invisible axis, The breakers slow-dolphining over more breakers, To swivel our easels down, as firm As conquerors who had discovered home. Derek Walcott
4
As human beings we’ve certainly suffered the loss of awe, the loss of sacredness, and the loss of the fact that we’re not here– we’re not put on earth– to shape it anyway we want.. You want something to happen with poetry, but it doesn’t make anything happen. So then somebody says, “What’s the use of poetry?” Then you say, “Well, what’s the use of a cloud? What’s the use of a river? What’s the use of a tree?” They don’t make anything happen. Derek Walcott
5
The future happens. No matter how much we scream. Derek Walcott
6
I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars. Derek Walcott
7
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
8
What are men? Children who doubt. Derek Walcott
9
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
10
In the Village IIIWho has removed the typewriter from my desk, so that I am a musician without his pianowith emptiness ahead as clear and grotesqueas another spring? My veins bud, and I am sofull of poems, a wastebasket of black wire. The notes outside are visible; sparrows willline antennae like staves, the way springs were, but the roofs are cold and the great grey riverwhere a liner glides, huge as a winter hill, moves imperceptibly like the accumulatingyears. I have no reason to forgive herfor what I brought on myself. I am past hating, past the longing for Italy where blowing snowabsolves and whitens a kneeling mountain rangeoutside Milan. Through glass, I am waitingfor the sound of a bird to unhinge the beginningof spring, but my hands, my work, feel strangewithout the rusty music of my machine. No wordsfor the Arctic liner moving down the Hudson, for the mangeof old snow moulting from the roofs. No poems. No birds. Derek Walcott
11
Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves. Derek Walcott
12
The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself. Derek Walcott