A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

quote by Derek Walcott
Added by Lucian Velea
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past.

quote by Derek Walcott
Added by Lucian Velea
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Any serious attempt to try to do something worthwhile is ritualistic.

quote by Derek Walcott
Added by Lucian Velea
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Because that is what such a city is, in the New World, a writer's heaven.

quote by Derek Walcott
Added by Lucian Velea
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average.

quote by Derek Walcott
Added by Lucian Velea
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves.

quote by Derek Walcott
Added by Lucian Velea
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

quote by Derek Walcott
Added by Lucian Velea
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

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.

quote by Derek Walcott
Added by Lucian Velea
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

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.

quote by Derek Walcott
Added by Lucian Velea
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

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.

quote by Derek Walcott
Added by Lucian Velea
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!