W.S. Merwin quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by W.S. Merwin

W.S. Merwin Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from W.S. Merwin on Wise Famous Quotes.

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

Your absence has gone through me

The dead are not separate from the living
each has one foot in the unknown
and cannot speak for the other

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

In my youth I believed in somewhere else
I put my faith in travel
now I am becoming my own tree

We are not born to survive. Only to live.

Now all my teachers are dead except silence.

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

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

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 remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you

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

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.

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

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

When I was me I remembered
I could remember what was not there
but may have been there
once

here is the known hand again knowing remembering
at night after the doubting and the news of age

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

A garden is made of hope.

Tell me what you see vanishing and I will tell you who you are

I offer you what I have my
Poverty

Turning the pages patiently in search of meanings

I am an abyss that I am trying to cross.

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

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

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

How beautiful you must be
to have been able to lead me
this far with only
the sound of your going away

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

We are asleep with compasses in our hands.

We are the echo of the future.

We keep asking where they have gone
those years we remember and we
reach for them like hands in the night

My cradle
was a shoe.

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

What I remember I cannot tell
though it is there in all that I say

Even there a shining is flowing from all the stones
though the eyes are not yet made that can see it

I needed my mistakes
in their order
to get me here

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

As though it had always been forbidden to remember
each of us grew up
knowing nothing about the beginning

I have no way of telling what I miss
I am the only one who misses it

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

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

The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.

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

endless patience will never be enough
the only hope is to be the daylight

Where will the meanings be
when the words are forgotten
will I see again
where you are

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.

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

What you remember saves you.

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

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