Poetry Quotes
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I can't tear up a poem and be a sound bite for you. Why is that so hard for anyone to understand?
Quote by -Derek Walcott
The thing a writer has to avoid is being the 'voice' of his people and pretending he can speak for them.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
The Chinese, the African, and the European - they are all there. So the division of the Caribbean experience into being emphatically only African is absurd.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
Poets are always making waves. I mean, you know, in an ideal situation, the ideal republic can't tolerate poets because - it isn't that they mutter and criticize; it is that the poet does not accept the situation called the 'perfect' condition of man - in other words, perfect in the materialistic sense.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
Miscegenation is not an idea that we would have in the Caribbean. It wouldn't come up because anybody could marry anybody, you know. I'm not saying that there aren't prejudices in the Caribbean, but the idea of the word 'miscegenation' is not something that we think of.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
The poet complains or points out the discontent that lies at the heart of man, the individual man, and how can that be redeemed?
Quote by -Derek Walcott
When I come to England, I don't claim England; I don't own it. I feel a great kinship because of the literature and the landscape. I have great affection for Edward Thomas and Philip Larkin, but there's still this distance: looking on at what I'm admiring, separate from what I am. And that's OK.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
The Caribbean is not an idyll, not to its natives. They draw their working strength from it organically, like trees, like the sea almond or the spice laurel of the heights.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
The history of the world - by which, of course, we mean Europe - is a record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic cleansings.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
I was writing from a very, very early age. My father used to write. He died early, and my mother was a schoolteacher, so my academic background from childhood is a strong one, a good one.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
You would get some fantastic syntactical phenomena. You would hear people talking in Barbados in the exact melody as a minor character in Shakespeare. Because here you have a thing that was not immured and preserved and mummified, but a voluble language, very active, very swift, very sharp.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
When I went to college - when I read Shakespeare or Dickens or Scott - I just felt that, as a citizen of England, a British citizen, this was as much my heritage as any schoolboy's. That is one of the things the Empire taught, that apart from citizenship, the synonymous inheritance of the citizenship was the literature.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
I go back to St. Lucia, and the exhilaration I feel is not simply the exhilaration of homecoming and of nostalgia. It is almost an irritation of feeling: 'Well, you never got it right. Now you have another chance. Maybe you can try and look harder.'
Quote by -Derek Walcott
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.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
I grew up in a place in which, if you learned poetry, you shouted it out. Boys would scream it out and perform it and do it and flourish it.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
I always have difficulty with the Greek tragic plays. I think the difficulty one has - which is a serious problem - is the question of belief. Do you believe in the myth that the play expresses? Do you believe in it as myth or as reality? With any play, you have to believe in it as reality. You can't act a myth.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
My generation produced some terrific writers from all over, and the great thing about it is that they were all mixed in race.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
Modesty is not possible in performance in the Caribbean - and that's wonderful.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
What I described in 'Another Life' - about being on the hill and feeling the sort of dissolution that happened - is a frequent experience in a younger writer.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
I have to live, socially, in an almost unfinished society. Among the almost great, among the almost true, among the almost honest. That allows me to describe the anguish.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
What makes a poem is the discipline inherent in making a poem: trying to fit feelings in the requisite number of syllables and lines, disciplining one's feelings.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
I'm read in the Caribbean with justice, with fairness. What I expect it to do is to encourage articulacy in the young.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
I don't feel like a celebrity. Poetry justifies celebrity. It's good to have respect for a poet.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
As much as I like teaching and students, it's a kind of rigor, a discipline, that's against my body.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
Like any art, what is the most imprisoning thing is also the most delivering thing. If an actor knows he only has 12 syllables in a line, the challenge is, 'How can I interpret the meaning and contain it without going one syllable over?'
Quote by -Derek Walcott
The number of people who read a poem is not as important as how the poem affects those who read it.
Quote by -Derek Walcott
Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy... or they become legend.
Quote by -Jim Harrison
We pretend that the brain is binary, like a computer. But it's not. It's completely holographic.
Quote by -Jim Harrison
Naturally we would prefer seven epiphanies a day and an earth not so apparently devoid of angels.
Quote by -Jim Harrison
The big curse of America, to me, is skinless, boneless chicken breasts. They're banal and relatively flavorless. The rest of the world's trying to get some fat to eat, and we're trying to ban it from our diet.
Quote by -Jim Harrison
Either you can do what others want, or you can do what you want to do. That's an easy call.
Quote by -Jim Harrison
We are delightfully trapped by our memories. I can't drink a bottle of Chateauneuf-du-Pape Vieux Telegraphe without revisiting a hotel bistro in Luzerne, Switzerland, where I ate a large bowl of a peppery Basque baby goat stew. A sip and a bite. A bite and sip. Goose bumps come with the divine conjunction of food and wine.
Quote by -Jim Harrison
There's something frightening about finding a woman who would take your heart.
Quote by -Jim Harrison
After a lifetime of world travel I've been fascinated that those in the third world don't have the same perception of reality that we do.
Quote by -Jim Harrison
My biggest pet peeve is when you go to a fine restaurant, and it's like a mausoleum inside. Good food should be joyful. There should be laughter and chatter, not people sitting there like they're in a funeral-parlor waiting room.
Quote by -Jim Harrison
I do mourn my characters. I wrote an essay once where I was sure that far back in a marsh there was a hummock - a little hill of hardwoods - and an old farm house, where all the heroines in my novels lived together with all my beloved dead dogs. I've discussed this with my therapist, naturally. He says it's okay in fair amounts.
Quote by -Jim Harrison
As a child, I was an obsessive reader, as was everybody in my family all winter long with my father. I think I was only 8 when I read Edward Gibbon's 'The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.'
Quote by -Jim Harrison
I've got a poem that's in a lot of international anthologies called 'After the Anonymous Swedish' and I thought, 'Well, I'm a Swede. I can make up a Swedish poem.' It turned out pretty good.
Quote by -Jim Harrison
You can be in terrible shape, and if you take a three-hour walk through the forest and along the river, you're simply not the same as when you started out.
Quote by -Jim Harrison
Sometimes, I tell my wife I have to take a car trip and collect new memories - I like to drive around at absolute random for weeks on end through the United States and parts of Canada. Or else I feel trapped, like you feel when your life is completely planned for months in advance, and you think you're not getting enough oxygen.
Quote by -Jim Harrison