W. S. Merwin Quotes

As a child, I used to have a secret dread – and a recurring nightmare – of the whole world becoming city, being covered with cement and buildings and streets. No more country. No more woods.

The past is always – one moment it’s what happened three minutes ago, and one minute it’s what happened 30 years ago. And they flow into each other in ways that we can’t predict and that we keep discovering in dreams, which keep bringing up feelings and moments, some of which we never actually saw.

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

I think memory is essential to what we are. If we – we wouldn’t be able to talk to each other without memory. And what we think of as the present really is the past. It is made out of the past.

What turned me into an environmentalist, on my eleventh birthday, was seeing the first strip mine.

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.

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

The Arab world is erupting, which is extraordinary, and to see it happen is like watching rings spreading on a pool – it goes out; it varies so much. The spontaneity is wonderful, but very often, if it’s not well organized, it breaks up, and it peters out.

In a sense, much that is learned is bound to be bad habits. You’re always beginning again.

I needed my mistakes in their order to get me here

The idea of writing, to me, was, from the beginning, was writing something which was a little different from the ordinary exchange of speech. It was something that had a certain formality, something in which the words were of interest in themselves.

I am too conscious of being an American to accept public congratulation with good grace or to welcome it except as an occasion for expressing openly a shame which many Americans feel, day after day, helplessly and in silence.

The Indians seemed to be living in a place and in a way that was of immense importance to me. So I associate learning to read – English, oddly enough – with wanting to know about Indians. I’m still growing into it. I’ve never outgrown that.

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.

From what we cannot hold the stars are made.

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

We are asleep with compasses in our hands.

Your absence has gone through me

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

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

That’s a great gift to be given, that feeling of no fear.

Now all my teachers are dead except silence.

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

The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.

You have to be rather relentless about pushing other things out of the way. This activity of writing, which has no promises attached to it, comes to be given a kind of arbitrary but persistent importance.