Derek Walcott

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

“The future happens. No matter how much we scream.”

“For every poet it is always morning in the world; history a forgotten, insomniac night.”

“Art is history's nostalgia, it prefers a ruin to a house.”

“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.”

“I have never separated the writing of poetry from prayer. I have grown up believing it is a vocation, a religious vocation.”

“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.”

“That's the sweat of history, a smell that precedes grammar.”

“The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other’s welcome.”

“The process of writing is one of discovering what is in you.”

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

“The sea is history.”

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

“Poetry, which is perfection's sweat, denies that there's a happiness formula.”