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The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

— Derek Walcott for The Paris Review (1986)

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Imagination

More quotes by Derek Walcott

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.

I try to forget what happiness was,
and when that don't work, I study the stars.

The Schooner Flight (1980)

Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe … I don’t think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.

The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.

A Far Cry from Africa (1962)

Peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Collected Poems, 1948-1984 (1986)

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Some of my youthful readers are developing wonderful imaginations. This pleases me.

L. Frank Baum Introduction to The Lost Princess of Oz (1917)

There is an inverse relationship between imagination and money.

Alan Moore

An active imagination may find a bad tendency arising out of every transaction between imperfect morals.

Edward Hall Alderson Brownlow v. Egerton (1854)

Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.

David Hume A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Derek Walcott (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.