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"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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"In the legal respect, after the execution of the supposed incendiaries, the other half of Moscow burned down."

"Up to 90% of all inventions of the world comes from the Protestant world."

"And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history-money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery-the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy."

"If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music and of aviation."

"In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future of the city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where note even the ashes of his glory would remain."

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."

"Our aadivasi sisters and brothers have played a paramount role in the freedom struggle. For hundreds of years, people across villages of the country kept alive the flame of sacrifices for attaining independence. They left no stone unturned in helping India attain freedom."
Explore more quotes by Derek Walcott

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."
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