- Poet | January 23, 1930 -
I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.
Derek Walcott
PrayerPoetryWritingBelievingUp
My family background really only consists of my mother. She was a widow. My father died quite young; he must have been thirty-one. Then there was my twin brother and my sister. We had two aunts as well, my father's sisters. But the immediate family consisted of my mother, my brother, my sister, and me.
FamilyFatherMotherBrotherSister
I'm from the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean in the Lesser Antilles, the lower part of the archipelago, which is a bilingual island - French, Creole, and English - but my education is in English.
EducationIslandCaribbeanEnglish
A noun is not a name you give something. It is something you watch becoming itself, and you have to have the patience to find out what it is.
PatienceNameYouFindOutWatch
I hate all that nonsense about not touching the colonialists' language. All that about it being corrupting and belonging to the master and making you Caliban. That thinking just denies you an outlet. You deny everything that is great from a language, whether it is Conrad or Shakespeare.
GreatHateThinkingLanguageYou
The painter I really thought I could learn from was Cezanne - some sort of resemblance to oranges and greens and browns of the dry season in St. Lucia.
ThoughtLearnDrySeasonPainter
The country that I was coming from, the island I was in, hadn't been written about, really. So I thought that I virtually had it all to myself, including the language that was spoken there, which was a French Creole, and a landscape that is not recorded, really, and the people.
MyselfPeopleThoughtLanguageBeen
I am only one-eighth the writer I might have been had I contained all the fragmented languages of Trinidad.
I AmMightOnlyBeenWriterAm
Sometimes what we call tragedy, at least in the theater, are really case histories. They're based on the central figure, and things happen to that person, and they're called tragedy because they're extremely sad. But tragedy always has a glorious thing happen at the end of it. That's what the catharsis is.
SadEndTragedyThings HappenPerson
If you talk about language in the Caribbean, you must relate it to history.
HistoryLanguageYouTalkCaribbean
I made a vow that I wouldn't be tempted by what could happen to me if I went to Europe. I thought, 'You could be absorbed in it - it's so seductive, you might lose your own search for identity.' Then, when I did finally go to Europe, I was able to resist it because I had established my own identity.
IdentityMeThoughtSearchYouLose
You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp.
CharacterPeopleLanguageTalking
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