Top 15 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 truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element…

What are men? Children who doubt.

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.

The classics can console. But not enough.

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

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.

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

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.

I loved them as poets love the poetry
that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea.

…and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.