Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for part memory part distance remaining mine in the ways that I learn to miss you from what we cannot hold the stars are made.
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
Learn
Missing
Cannot
Youth
Part
Hold
Remaining
Without
Memories
Miss
Made
Ways
Distance
Way
Stars
Memory
Knowing
Mines
Looking
Mine
More quotes by 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
We are asleep with compasses in our hands.
W. S. Merwin
Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for
W. S. Merwin
I offer you what I have my Poverty
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree
W. S. Merwin
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
come back believer in shade believer in silence and elegance believer in ferns believer in patience believer in the rain
W. S. Merwin
My cradle was a shoe.
W. S. Merwin
Laughter was the shape the darkness took around the first appearance of the light.
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
we travel far and fast and as we pass through we forget where we have been
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
