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"The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself."
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"All speech, written or spoken, is a dead language, until it finds a willing and prepared hearer."
"Words are not static.Language shape our memories, and it is also shaped by our memories."
"Words are clothes that thoughts wear."
"Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination."
"A word is not filling in the gaps, but the fertilization of silence."
"He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn't need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear."
"Our language now has become quick-moving (in syllables), and may be very supple and nimble, but is rather thin in sound and in sense too often diffuse and vague. the language of our forefathers, especially in verse, was slow, not very nimble, but very sonorous, and was intensely packed and concentrated - or could be in a good poet."
Explore more quotes by Derek Walcott
"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."
"Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves."
"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."
"If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average."
"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."
"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."
"The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts."
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