- Poet | January 23, 1930 -
The Caribbean is not an idyll, not to its natives. They draw their working strength from it organically, like trees, like the sea almond or the spice laurel of the heights.
Derek Walcott
StrengthSeaTreesHeightsSpice
We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.
PastLongToo MuchMakeMuchWhich
This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo.
CityMeCitizenHumanAthensPort
What was moving, I think, was the fact that the statue is a woman and not a heroic, manly figure. So for all her scale and immensity, there's something soft about the Statue of Liberty, something tender about her.
WomanMovingThinkLibertyManly
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.
LoveStrongerBreakWholeSymmetry
The Caribbean is an immense ocean that just happens to have a few islands in it. The people have an immense respect for it, awe of it.
RespectOceanPeopleAweCaribbean
The Chinese, the African, and the European - they are all there. So the division of the Caribbean experience into being emphatically only African is absurd.
ExperienceDivisionCaribbeanAbsurd
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.
LuckWalkingBodyIslandPersonal
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.
GodMemoryBodyRememberingBamboo
I am primarily, absolutely a Caribbean writer.
I AmCaribbeanAbsolutelyWriterAm
The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.
PeopleImportantPoemWhoAffects
I am grateful, you know. I have to be grateful in the sense that I feel that what I have is a gift.
GratefulI AmGiftFeelYouKnow
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