- Poet | January 23, 1930 -
I go back to St. Lucia, and the exhilaration I feel is not simply the exhilaration of homecoming and of nostalgia. It is almost an irritation of feeling: 'Well, you never got it right. Now you have another chance. Maybe you can try and look harder.'
Derek Walcott
ChanceFeelYouLookBackNostalgia
The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.
ImaginationLanguageNobodySpecial
I consider the sound of the sea to be part of my body.
SeaBodySoundPartConsider
There is a force of exultation, a celebration of luck, when a writer finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture that is defining itself, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, in that self-defining dawn, which is why, especially at the edge of the sea, it is good to make a ritual of the sunrise.
GoodMorningSeaCultureSunrise
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.
HistorySugarOverAbandonedRuins
The discontent that lies in the human condition is not satisfied simply by material things.
Material ThingsHumanSatisfiedLies
All of the Antilles, every island, is an effort of memory: every mind, every racial biography culminating in amnesia and fog. Pieces of sunlight through the fog and sudden rainbows, arcs-en-ciel. That is the effort, the labour of the Antillean imagination, rebuilding its gods from bamboo frames, phrase by phrase.
ImaginationEffortMemoryFogMind
Rhyme is an attempt to reassemble and reaffirm the possibility of paradise. There is a wholeness, a serenity, in sounds coupling to form a memory.
MemorySerenityParadiseAttempt
A long time ago, I thought, as a writer in the Caribbean, 'I don't ever want to have to write 'It was great in Paris.'' Because I don't think, proportionately speaking, that one's experience in a city as opposed to, say, a village in St. Lucia, is superior to the other.
GreatTimeExperienceCityThink
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.
StylePerformanceSocietyPlaceCome
Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.
BeautyHistorySurpriseLandscape
For so long, the world has viewed West Indian culture as semiliterate and backward, which it is not. In my work, I have tried to give that world an exposure so the world can better understand it.
WorkCultureWorldBetterLongWest
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