Top 81 Merwin Quotes
#1. The very best of all Merwin: I have been reading William since 1952, and always with joy.
Harold Bloom
#2. W.S Merwin says "after three days of rain" and I write "After Twelve Days of Rain." I like his quietude. I admire his ability to be simple without being simplistic.
Dorianne Laux
#3. I always think [W.S.] Merwin's poems will last of anyone writing today. If I had to bet on posterity I would bet Merwin. My poems could easily evaporate. So I don't know. If you find yourself as a writer thinking about posterity you should probably go out for a brisk walk or something.
Billy Collins
#4. The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.
W.S. Merwin
#6. 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
#7. Turning the pages patiently in search of meanings
W.S. Merwin
#8. 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
#9. We are not born to survive. Only to live.
W.S. Merwin
#11. On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree
W.S. Merwin
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. The waiter was a kind of surrogate uncle or grandfather for the duration of the meal; he paradoxically made you feel at home by treating you with undisguised contempt.
Ted Merwin
#16. 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
#17. I have no way of telling what I miss
I am the only one who misses it
W.S. Merwin
#18. Separation
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
W.S. Merwin
#20. I am an abyss that I am trying to cross.
W.S. Merwin
#21. 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
#23. We travel far and fast and as we pass through we forget where we have been
W.S. Merwin
#24. 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
#25. I will take with me the emptiness of my hands. What you do not have you find everywhere
W.S. Merwin
#26. My words are the garment of what I shall never be
Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.
W.S. Merwin
#27. We are asleep with compasses in our hands.
W.S. Merwin
#28. Part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you
W.S. Merwin
#29. 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
#30. Tell me what you see vanishing and I will tell you who you are
W.S. Merwin
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. When I was me I remembered
I could remember what was not there
but may have been there
once
W.S. Merwin
#35. 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
#36. The dead are not separate from the living
each has one foot in the unknown
and cannot speak for the other
W.S. Merwin
#37. It's not about who's got powers, morons. It's about who's not afraid. And who's going to do what has to be done.
Michael Grant
#38. Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
W.S. Merwin
#39. I needed my mistakes
in their order
to get me here
W.S. Merwin
#40. Now all my teachers are dead except silence.
W.S. Merwin
#41. Come back
believer in shade
believer in silence and elegance
believer in ferns
believer in patience
believer in the rain
W.S. Merwin
#42. 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
#43. Laughter was the shape the darkness took around the first appearance of the light.
W.S. Merwin
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.
W.S. Merwin
#49. As though it had always been forbidden to remember
each of us grew up
knowing nothing about the beginning
W.S. Merwin
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. What I remember I cannot tell
though it is there in all that I say
W.S. Merwin
#53. We keep asking where they have gone
those years we remember and we
reach for them like hands in the night
W.S. Merwin
#54. Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
W.S. Merwin
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. In my youth I believed in somewhere else
I put my faith in travel
now I am becoming my own tree
W.S. Merwin
#59. 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
#60. endless patience will never be enough
the only hope is to be the daylight
W.S. Merwin
#61. 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
#62. I have with me all that I do not know. I have lost none of it.
W.S. Merwin
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#67. Even there a shining is flowing from all the stones
though the eyes are not yet made that can see it
W.S. Merwin
#68. You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us
W.S. Merwin
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Where will the meanings be
when the words are forgotten
will I see again
where you are
W.S. Merwin
#72. here is the known hand again knowing remembering
at night after the doubting and the news of age
W.S. Merwin
#74. 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
#75. Through all of youth I was looking for you
without knowing what I was looking for
W.S. Merwin
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. I have been younger in October
than in all the months of spring.
W.S. Merwin
#81. How am I supposed to feed you?" Drake demanded.
"Darkness say to coyote: don't kill human. Did not say don't eat dead human."
Drake laughed with a certain delight. This Pack Leader was definitely a smarter animal than the original one.
Michael Grant
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