Love Quote by Derek Walcott

Walcott takes a domestic disaster - a shattered vase - and turns it into a theory of attention. The first love in the line is complacent, aesthetic: it admires the object because it arrives already coherent, already "symmetry". The second love is labor, patience, and humility. It has to look closely, handle sharp edges, accept missing chips, live with seams. That is why it can be "stronger": not because damage is secretly good, but because repair forces a kind of earned intimacy that wholeness can let you skate past.

The verb choice matters. "Reassembles" is practical, almost unromantic. This isn't a Hallmark ode to healing; it's craft. Walcott, a playwright from the Caribbean with a lifelong preoccupation with fracture - colonial history, hybrid identity, broken inheritances - knows that "whole" is often a flattering illusion. Many things that appear complete are simply untested. Breakage exposes what was previously invisible: the joints, the weak points, the care you weren't paying.

The subtext is also a warning against fetishizing perfection. Symmetry here is a kind of tyranny: it trains us to value the unblemished and to discard what shows strain. Walcott argues for a different metric of worth, one that honors the mended as evidence of devotion rather than evidence of failure. The love he praises is not blind optimism; it's the stubborn decision to keep choosing the thing, even after it's proven fragile.