Top 35 Derek Walcott Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I read; I travel; I become.”

— Derek Walcott

Featured in: Travel Quotes

2. “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

3. “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

4. “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

5. “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

6. “Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.”

— Derek Walcott

7. “To change your language you must change your life.”

— Derek Walcott

8. “Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.”

— Derek Walcott

9. “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

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

— Derek Walcott

11. “What are men? Children who doubt.”

— Derek Walcott

12. “The classics can console. But not enough.”

— Derek Walcott

13. “In Eden who sleeps happiest? The serpent.”

— Derek Walcott

14. “The future happens. No matter how much we scream.”

— Derek Walcott

15. “I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.”

— Derek Walcott

16. “Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.”

— Derek Walcott

17. “Time is the metre, memory the only plot.”

— Derek Walcott

18. “I too saw the wooden horse blocking the stars.”

— Derek Walcott

19. “The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts.”

— Derek Walcott

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

— Derek Walcott

21. “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

22. “If you know what you are going to write when you’re writing a poem, it’s going to be average.”

— Derek Walcott

23. “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

24. “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.”

— Derek Walcott

25. “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.”

— Derek Walcott

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

— Derek Walcott

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

— Derek Walcott

28. “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

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

— Derek Walcott

30. “The English language is nobody’s special property.”

— Derek Walcott

31. “How can I turn from Africa and live?”

— Derek Walcott

32. “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

33. “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

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

— Derek Walcott

35. “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

36. “Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind.”

— Derek Walcott

37. “You want to hear my history? Ask the sea.”

— Derek Walcott

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

— Derek Walcott