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
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.'
Interpretation
What this quote means
Returning to familiar places can evoke deep emotions and a desire for self-improvement.
Derek Walcott reflects on the complex feelings tied to returning to St. Lucia, emphasizing that such homecomings bring not only nostalgia but also a sense of personal accountability. The experience provokes an urge to confront past shortcomings and to seek a better understanding and appreciation of one’s roots and experiences.
Themes
NostalgiaHomecomingSelf-ImprovementReflectionGrowth
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech about personal growth, one could mention this quote to emphasize the importance of learning from past experiences.
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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