Derek Walcott Quotes

I am grateful, you know. I have to be grateful in the sense that I feel that what I have is a gift.

Derek Walcott

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Quotes to Explore

• It's a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb.

  

  Aaron Sorkin
  • Life
  • Dumb
  • Unpredictable

• Behavior used to be reinforced by great deprivation; if people weren't hungry, they wouldn't work. Now we are committed to feeding people whether they work or not. Nor is money as great a reinforcer as it once was. People no longer work for punitive reasons, yet our culture offers no new satisfactions.

  

  B. F. Skinner
  • People
  • Work
  • Great

• Any reflection about poetry should begin, or end, with this question: who and how many read poetry books?

  

  Octavio Paz
  • Question
  • Poetry
  • End

• A man that ain't willin' to cheat for a poke don't want it bad enough.

  

  Larry McMurtry
  • Bad
  • Want
  • Man

• I don't know that I'd call myself an optimist.

  

  Patrick deWitt
  • Know
  • Myself
  • Optimist

• It is a myth that art has to be sold. It is not like stocking a grocery store where people fill a pushcart. Art is a product that has no apparent need. The salesperson builds the need in the mind of the buyer.

  

  Jack White The White Stripes
  • People
  • Mind
  • Art

• People love gospel music. It's calming. It's soothing. It gets right to the point of whatever you're dealing with.

  

  Yolanda Adams
  • People
  • Music
  • Love

• Never fight an inanimate object.

  

  P. J. O'Rourke
  • Funny
  • Never
  • Fight

• I wanted to be what my high-school civics and history teacher thought of as a good American. That automatically involved taking an interest in government.

  

  Olivia De Havilland
  • Good
  • School
  • American

• I don't believe actors who say they don't bleed into their characters. It's absolutely impossible not to.

  

  Zoe Saldana
  • Believe
  • Impossible
  • Say

• Imagine if I'd said, 'I have to be the best actress - I want that and nothing else.' I never would have directed. I never would have produced. I never would have done a beauty line. I would have just worried about getting a job or been frustrated that I wasn't getting the job that I wanted. I was ready to be a businesswoman.

  

  Salma Hayek
  • Done
  • Job
  • Best

• So many able historians have worked over seventeenth-century New England that one would think there was little left to be learned from the people who lived there - fewer than 100,000 at the end of the century. Seldom, apart perhaps from the Greeks and Romans, have so few been studied by so many.

  

  Edmund Morgan
  • People
  • Think
  • End

• Civilization and profit go hand in hand.

  

  Calvin Coolidge
  • Hand
  • Civilization
  • Go

• Wherefore for the public interest and benefit of human society it is requisite that the highest obligations possible should be laid upon the consciences of men.

  

  Isaac Barrow
  • Men
  • Society
  • Human

• The noble gases, which reside on the East Coast of the periodic table, are its aristocrats - detached and aloof, never bothering to interact with the rabble of common elements that make up the vast majority of the world.

  

  Sam Kean
  • Up
  • World
  • Never

• The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one’s clean linen in public.

  

  Oscar Wilde
  • Women
  • Bad
  • Husbands

• These women, capable of the most sublime emotions, of the tenderest sympathies, were openmouthed and screaming. They wanted to live, they were helpless, likes rats in a trap, and they screamed.

  

  Jack London
  • Live
  • Women

• 'Oh, to be a minion,' muttered Giac to himself dreamily. 'I was a sub-minion.'

  

  Garth Nix
  • Minion

• The one thing I've always done as an author is talk to my publicists. Because they have all the best stories - and they have all the dirt on other, more famous and important writers. They're not supposed to talk about it, but sometimes you can get awesome little tidbits from them.

  

  Lynn Coady
  • Important
  • Done
  • Famous

• What I believe is not what I say I believe; what I believe is what I do. I used to say that I believed it was important to tell people about Jesus, but I never did. A friend kindly explained that if I do not introduce people to Jesus, then I don't believe Jesus is an important person. It doesn't matter what I say. We live for what we believe.

  

  Donald Miller
  • People
  • Believe
  • Important

• 'The Lunchbox' is the kind of cinema that is true to its word and not cluttered or corrupted by some of the mainstream pre-requisites. I love the way I make movies, but there are certain stories that need to be told in a certain way, and 'The Lunchbox' is that movie, and I'm so proud to present this movie.

  

  Karan Johar
  • Kind
  • Proud
  • Stories

• If I had taken a doctoral degree, it would have stifled any writing capacity.

  

  Barbara W. Tuchman
  • Writing
  • Taken
  • Capacity

• It is women who must clean up the mess men make, the mess everything makes

  

  Christina Stead
  • Men
  • Women
  • Mess

• I am grateful, you know. I have to be grateful in the sense that I feel that what I have is a gift.

  

  Derek Walcott