W. S. Merwin Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

The dead will think the living are worth it we will know Who we are And we will all enlist again.

W. S. Merwin
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.

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

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

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

W. S. Merwin
Sometimes it is inconceivable that I should be the age I am.

W. S. Merwin
You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us

W. S. Merwin
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day.

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

W. S. Merwin
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
The sea curling
Star-climbed, wind-combed, cumbered with itself still
As at first it was, is the hand not yet contented
Of the Creator. And he waits for the world to begin.

W. S. Merwin
Like shadows of the plumbing that is all that is left of the great city.

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

W. S. Merwin
This is the black sea-brute bulling through wave-wrack,
Ancient as ocean's shifting hills.

W. S. Merwin
Oh pile of white shirts who is coming to breathe in your shapes.

W. S. Merwin
I am the son of the first fish who climbed ashore but the news has not yet reached my bowels.

W. S. Merwin
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
You came back to us in a dream and we were not here.

W. S. Merwin
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
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