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 knew very early what I wanted to do, and I considered myself lucky to know that's what I wanted, even in a place like Saint Lucia where there was no publishing house and no theatre.
Interpretation
The speaker expresses gratitude for knowing their passion early in life, despite limited opportunities in their environment.
Derek Walcott reflects on the importance of self-awareness and clarity of purpose, emphasizing that recognizing one's passion, even in a challenging environment like Saint Lucia, is a form of luck. This statement highlights the value of having a clear direction in life and the inherent challenges that can arise from a lack of resources or support.
In practice
In a motivational speech, you could use this quote to inspire others to pursue their dreams despite obstacles.
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.
Creating a poem is a continual process of re-creating your ignorance, in the sense of not knowing what's coming next.
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.
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.
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.
The truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element.
My daddy thought - no, he expected - that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He was correct in his belief because he had lived in an America of continual social progress, depression followed by prosperity, segregation by integration, and so on.
It's like all my life I've been this tower standing at the edge of the ocean for some obscure purpose, and only now, almost eighteen years in, has someone thought to flip the switch that reveals that I'm not a tower at all. I'm a lighthouse. It's like waking up. I am incandescent.
Nobody cares if you can't dance well.
As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left us in a bad time.
You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.
Fairy tales had been her first experience of the magical universe, and more than once she had wondered why people ended up distancing themselves from that world, knowing the immense joy that childhood had brought to their lives.
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