Derek Walcott quotes
Derek Walcott
Birthdate: 23. January 1930
Date of death: 17. March 2017
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright. He received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the University of Alberta's first distinguished scholar in residence, where he taught undergraduate and graduate writing courses. He also served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Essex from 2010 to 2013. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros , which many critics view "as Walcott's major achievement." In addition to winning the Nobel Prize, Walcott received many literary awards over the course of his career, including an Obie Award in 1971 for his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award, a Royal Society of Literature Award, the Queen's Medal for Poetry, the inaugural OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the 2011 T. S. Eliot Prize for his book of poetry White Egrets and the Griffin Trust For Excellence in Poetry Lifetime Recognition Award in 2015. Wikipedia
Works
Sea Grapes
Derek Walcott
Omeros
Derek WalcottQuotes Derek Walcott
„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.“
"Love after Love"
Source: "A Far Cry from Africa" (1962), Collected Poems, 1948-1984 (1986)
„I never thought I would see the day when America (which is based on the idea of liberty, from which the world Liberal comes) would become so self-centered and hypocritical. I mean if democracy considers liberal to be a term of abuse, then we should be terrified. A liberal is someone who belives in liberty. And if it is wrong to be liberal, then the other side has to be facist.“
Conversations with Derek Walcott (University Press Mississippi, 1996, page.165)
„Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.“
Interview with Ed Hirsch (1986), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series (Penguin, 1988)
„No masterpieces in huge frames to worship,
… and yet there are the days
when every street corner rounds itself into
a sunlit surprise, a painting or a phrase,
canoes drawn up by the market, the harbour’s blue,
the barracks. So much to do still, all of it praise.“
"A Far Cry from Africa" (1962), White Egrets
„I try to forget what happiness was,
and when that don't work, I study the stars.“
"After the Storm"
"A Far Cry from Africa" (1962), "The Schooner Flight" (1980)
„Then silence is sawn in half by a dragonfly
as eels sign their names along the bottom-sand
when the sunrise brightens the river's memory and waves of huge ferns are nodding to the sea's sound.
Although the smoke forgets the earth from which is ascends
and the nettles guard the holes where the laurels were killed an iguana hears the axes, clouding each lens
over its lost name, when the hunched island was called
'Iounalao' 'Where it iguana is from' But, taking its own time, the iguana will scale
the rigging of vines in a year, its dewlap fanned,
its elbows akimbo, its deliberate tail moving with the island. The slit pods of its eyes
ripened in a pause that lasted for centuries,
that rose with the Aruacs' smoke till a new race unknown to the lizard stood measuring the trees.
These were their pillars that fell, leaving a blue space
for a single God where the old gods stood before, The first god was a gommier. The generator
began with a whine, and a shark, with sidewise jaw,
sent the chips flying like mackrel over water into trembling weeds“
— Derek Walcott, book Omeros
"A Far Cry from Africa" (1962), Omeros
„The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.“
Interview with Ed Hirsch (1986), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series (Penguin, 1988)
„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.“
Interview with Ed Hirsch (1986), Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, Eighth Series (Penguin, 1988)
„Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe … I don’t think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.“
Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas are Born (Penguin, 1990), pp. 176
„The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.“
"A Far Cry from Africa" (1962)
„Peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.“
"Love after Love"
"A Far Cry from Africa" (1962), Collected Poems, 1948-1984 (1986)
