Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
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
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
W. S. Merwin
Age: 91 †
Born: 1927
Born: September 30
Died: 2019
Died: March 15
Poet
Translator
Writer
New York City
New York
William Stanley Merwin
Tree
Feathers
Age
Trees
Night
Leaves
Money
Rain
Someone
Mountain
Thought
Cutting
Hard
Wind
Dead
More quotes by W. S. Merwin
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
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 When the last fires will wave to me
W. S. Merwin
Laughter was the shape the darkness took around the first appearance of the light.
W. S. Merwin
My cradle was a shoe.
W. S. Merwin
Now all my teachers are dead except silence.
W. S. Merwin
I will take with me the emptiness of my hands. What you do not have you find everywhere
W. S. Merwin
From what we cannot hold the stars are made.
W. S. Merwin
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
The attempt to live that way, the attempt to treat everybody - it fails all the time - but the attempt to treat people as equals is a good attempt. It's a very good attempt. And there have been very few governments that have come anywhere near it in the past. The Greeks began to, the Romans began to - they both failed.
W. S. Merwin
What you remember saves you.
W. S. Merwin
We are the echo of the future.
W. S. Merwin
Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.
W. S. Merwin
come back believer in shade believer in silence and elegance believer in ferns believer in patience believer in the rain
W. S. Merwin
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
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
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.
W. S. Merwin
I needed my mistakes in their order to get me here
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
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
