Top 73 W.S. Merwin Quotes
#1. I have with me all that I do not know. I have lost none of it.
W.S. Merwin
#2. The silence of a place where there were once horses
is a mountain
and I have seen by lightning that ever mountain
once fell from the air
ringing
like the chime of an iron shoe ...
W.S. Merwin
#3. endless patience will never be enough
the only hope is to be the daylight
W.S. Merwin
#4. He suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally
W.S. Merwin
#5. In my youth I believed in somewhere else
I put my faith in travel
now I am becoming my own tree
W.S. Merwin
#6. To say what or where we came from has nothing to do with what or where we came from. We do not come from there any more, but only from each word that proceeds out of the mouth of the unnamed. And yet sometimes it is our only way of pointing to who we are.
W.S. Merwin
#7. There are aspects of human life that are not purely destructive, and there is a need to pay attention to the things around us while they are still around us. And you know, in a way, if you don't pay that attention, the anger is just bitterness.
W.S. Merwin
#8. Send me out into another life
lord because this one is growing faint
I do not think it goes all the way
W.S. Merwin
#9. Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
W.S. Merwin
#10. Laughter was the shape the darkness took around the first appearance of the light.
W.S. Merwin
#11. What I remember I cannot tell
though it is there in all that I say
W.S. Merwin
#12. So this is what I am
Pondering his eyes that could not
Conceive that I was a creature to run from
I who have always believed too much in words
W.S. Merwin
#13. Any work of art makes one very simple demand on anyone who genuinely wants to get in touch with it. And that is to stop. You've got to stop what you're doing, what you're thinking, and what you're expecting and just be there for the poem for however long it takes.
W.S. Merwin
#14. As though it had always been forbidden to remember
each of us grew up
knowing nothing about the beginning
W.S. Merwin
#15. Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.
W.S. Merwin
#16. I'm very pessimistic about the future of the human species. We have been so indifferent to life on the whole that it will take its toll. It's not just the polar bears that are having a hard time; what we're doing is gradually impoverishing and poisoning the whole of the rest of life.
W.S. Merwin
#17. I think there's a kind of desperate hope built into poetry that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there's still time.
W.S. Merwin
#18. The wind lifts the whole branch of the poplar
carries it up and out and holds it there
while each leaf is the whole tree reaching
from its roots in the dark earth out through all
its rings of memory to where it has never been
W.S. Merwin
#20. We keep asking where they have gone
those years we remember and we
reach for them like hands in the night
W.S. Merwin
#21. I have been younger in October
than in all the months of spring.
W.S. Merwin
#22. Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars It is my emptiness among them While they drift farther away in the invisible morning
W.S. Merwin
#23. I wouldn't be happy about being considered a love poet or an environmental - I don't want any of those tags.
W.S. Merwin
#24. Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.
W.S. Merwin
#26. Through all of youth I was looking for you
without knowing what I was looking for
W.S. Merwin
#27. But most love poetry is awful; nobody knows how to write good love poetry either. But that's not a reason not to write love poetry. Some of the best poetry ever written has been love poetry, and some of the greatest poetry ever written has been political poetry.
W.S. Merwin
#28. After an age of leaves and feathers someone dead thought of the mountain as money and cut the trees that were here and the wind and the rain at night. It is hard to say it.
W.S. Merwin
#29. here is the known hand again knowing remembering
at night after the doubting and the news of age
W.S. Merwin
#30. Where will the meanings be
when the words are forgotten
will I see again
where you are
W.S. Merwin
#31. To succeed [,] consider what is as though it were past, deem yourself inevitable and take credit for it. If you no longer believe, enlarge the temple.
W.S. Merwin
#32. we know
from the beginning that the darkness
is beyond us there is no explaining
the dark it is only the light
that we keep feeling a need to account for
W.S. Merwin
#33. You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us
W.S. Merwin
#34. Even there a shining is flowing from all the stones
though the eyes are not yet made that can see it
W.S. Merwin
#36. If there'd been a better-balanced society, where there were other ways of making a decent living, I think it might have been different. That's not the way this setup work.
W.S. Merwin
#37. Certain words now in our knowledge we will not use again, and we will never forget them. We need them. Like the back of the picture.
W.S. Merwin
#40. All these years I have looked through your limbs
to the river below and the roofs and the night
and you were the way I saw the world
W.S. Merwin
#41. I am an abyss that I am trying to cross.
W.S. Merwin
#43. Separation
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
W.S. Merwin
#44. I have no way of telling what I miss
I am the only one who misses it
W.S. Merwin
#45. How long ago the day is
when at last I look at it
with the time it has taken
to be there still in it
W.S. Merwin
#46. I also think that life itself is both indifferent to us and the source of all of our joys and everything that we love. And it's necessary to accept the one in order to love the other.
W.S. Merwin
#47. I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't
you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write
W.S. Merwin
#48. We're losing a species every few seconds. We cannot put them back. If we change our mind and say, 'Oops, we made a mistake' - it's too late. This is the world we live with.
W.S. Merwin
#49. On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree
W.S. Merwin
#50. We are not born to survive. Only to live.
W.S. Merwin
#51. Apparently we believe
in the words
and through them
but we long beyond them
for what is unseen
what remains out of reach
what is kept covered
W.S. Merwin
#52. Turning the pages patiently in search of meanings
W.S. Merwin
#53. Going too fast for myself I missed
more than I think I can remember
almost everything it seems sometimes
and yet there are chances that come back
that I did not notice when they stood
where I could have reached out and touched them
W.S. Merwin
#54. The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.
W.S. Merwin
#55. When I was me I remembered
I could remember what was not there
but may have been there
once
W.S. Merwin
#56. Utterance
Sitting over words
Very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
Not far
Like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark
The echo of everything that has ever
Been spoken
Still spinning its one syllable
Between the earth and silence
W.S. Merwin
#57. Come back
believer in shade
believer in silence and elegance
believer in ferns
believer in patience
believer in the rain
W.S. Merwin
#58. Now all my teachers are dead except silence.
W.S. Merwin
#59. I needed my mistakes
in their order
to get me here
W.S. Merwin
#60. Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
W.S. Merwin
#61. The dead are not separate from the living
each has one foot in the unknown
and cannot speak for the other
W.S. Merwin
#62. A visitor to a garden sees the successes, usually. The gardener remembers mistakes and losses, some for a long time, and imagines the garden in a year, and in an unimaginable future.
W.S. Merwin
#63. What I really believe is the only hopeful relation between our life and the whole of life is one of reverence and respect and of feeling at one with it. The other attitude which is the one our society is based on is devastating and it is killing the earth and it is killing us too.
W.S. Merwin
#64. This is what I have heard at last the wind in December lashing the old trees with rain unseen rain racing along the tiles under the moon wind rising and falling wind with many clouds trees in the night wind.
W.S. Merwin
#65. How beautiful you must be
to have been able to lead me
this far with only
the sound of your going away
W.S. Merwin
#66. But is it really you
behind the pretenses
beyond dust and distances
beneath the salt and the siren
announcements and ancient
impurities and decays
that claim to be you
W.S. Merwin
#67. Tell me what you see vanishing and I will tell you who you are
W.S. Merwin
#68. When a poem is really finished, you can't change anything. You can't move words around. You can't say, 'In other words, you mean.' No, that's not it. There are no other words in which you mean it. This is it.
W.S. Merwin
#69. Part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you
W.S. Merwin
#70. We are asleep with compasses in our hands.
W.S. Merwin
#71. My words are the garment of what I shall never be
Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.
W.S. Merwin
#72. I will take with me the emptiness of my hands. What you do not have you find everywhere
W.S. Merwin
#73. We travel far and fast and as we pass through we forget where we have been
W.S. Merwin
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