Top 40 W. S. Merwin Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— W. S. Merwin

2. “I needed my mistakes in their order to get me here.”

— W. S. Merwin

3. “On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree.”

— W. S. Merwin

4. “We are the echo of the future.”

— W. S. Merwin

5. “From what we cannot hold, the stars are made.”

— W. S. Merwin

6. “We are not born to survive. Only to live.”

— W. S. Merwin

7. “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

8. “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

9. “What you remember saves you.”

— W. S. Merwin

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

— W. S. Merwin

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

— W. S. Merwin

12. “We are asleep with compasses in our hands.”

— W. S. Merwin

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

— W. S. Merwin

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

— W. S. Merwin

15. “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

16. “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

17. “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

18. “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

19. “Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for.”

— W. S. Merwin

20. “The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.”

— W. S. Merwin

21. “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

22. “You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us.”

— W. S. Merwin

23. “Your absence has gone through me.”

— W. S. Merwin

24. “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

25. “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

26. “I offer you what I have my Poverty.”

— W. S. Merwin

27. “Now all my teachers are dead except silence.”

— W. S. Merwin

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

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

— W. S. Merwin

36. “My cradle was a shoe.”

— W. S. Merwin

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

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

— W. S. Merwin

42. “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