W.S. Merwin Quotes

Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.

From what we cannot hold the stars are made.

come back believer in shade believer in silence and elegance believer in ferns believer in patience believer in the rain

Your absence has gone through me

On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree

We are asleep with compasses in our hands.

I say to my breath once again, little breath come from in front of me, go away behind me, row me quietly now, as far as you can, for I am an abyss that I am trying to cross.

Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.

The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.

Now all my teachers are dead except silence.

I have with me all that I do not knowI have lost none of it.

We are not born to survive. Only to live.

Laughter was the shape the darkness took around the first appearance of the light.

I will take with me the emptiness of my hands. What you do not have you find everywhere

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

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.

Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.

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.

What you remember saves you.

I have been younger in October than in all the months of spring.

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

We are the echo of the future.

I needed my mistakes in their order to get me here

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.

I wouldn't be happy about being considered a love poet or an environmental - I don't want any of those tags.

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day When the last fires will wave to me

You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us

we travel far and fast and as we pass through we forget where we have been

Send me out into another life lord because this one is growing faint I do not think it goes all the way

Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for

I offer you what I have my Poverty

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.

My words are the garment of what I shall never be Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.

My cradle was a shoe.

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.

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.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

part memory part distance remainingmine in the ways that I learn to miss you

A garden is made of hope.

I offer you what I have myPoverty

from what we cannot hold the stars are made

So this is what I amPondering his eyes that could notConceive that I was a creature to run fromI who have always believed too much in words

We keep asking where they have gonethose years we remember and wereach for them like hands in the night

Through all of youth I was looking for youwithout knowing what I was looking for

even there a shining is flowing from all the stonesthough the eyes are not yet made that can see it

On the last day of the worldI would want to plant a tree