I don't feel I've arrived home until I get on the beach. All my life, the theater of the sea has been a very strong thing.
Derek WalcottRead
Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on how art captures the essence of history and nostalgia, favoring simpler, more traditional forms over modernity.
Derek Walcott's quote emphasizes the idea that art serves as a vessel for nostalgia, often drawing upon historical and simpler settings in contrast to the complexities of modern industrial life. By highlighting the preference for a thatched roof and a towering church, the quote suggests that art yearns for the beauty and warmth of the past, presenting an aesthetic that resonates with emotional and cultural memory.
Themes
ArtHistoryNostalgiaCultureSimplicity
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be shared at an art exhibition to evoke a sense of historical appreciation.
More from Derek Walcott
All quotes →Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next.
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A long time ago, I thought, as a writer in the Caribbean, 'I don't ever want to have to write 'It was great in Paris.'' Because I don't think, proportionately speaking, that one's experience in a city as opposed to, say, a village in St. Lucia, is superior to the other.
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My mother was a schoolteacher and very, very encouraging. She understood what it meant when I said I wanted to be a writer; both me and my brother wrote.
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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.
Derek WalcottRead
The truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element.
Derek WalcottRead
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