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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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"The commonplace books of the old Puritans were invaluable to them. They would never have been able to compile such works as they did if they had not been careful in collecting and arranging their matter under different heads."
"The only lesson you can learn from history is that it repeats itself."
"Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great."
"Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It's a crime."Fuka-Eri thought about that for a moment.Tengo went on, "Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves."
"The tragedy about history - personally and globally - is that while we may learn it we rarely learn from it."
"By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. The foe long since in silence slept; Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; And Time the ruined bridge has swept, Down the dark stream which seaward creeps. On this green bank, by this soft stream, We set to-day a votive stone; That memory may their deed redeem, When, like our sires, our sons are gone. Spirit, that made those heroes dare, To die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare, The shaft we raise to them and thee."
"The whole of world history often seems to me nothing more than a picture book which portrays humanity's most powerful and a senseless desire - the desire to forget. Does not each generation, by means of suppression, concealment, and ridicule, efface what the previous generation considered most important?"
Explore more quotes by Derek Walcott
"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 English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average."
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