Quote

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

W. S. Merwin

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Lost
None

More quotes by W. S. Merwin

Image
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
Image
We are asleep with compasses in our hands.
W. S. Merwin
Image
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
Image
We are the echo of the future.
W. S. Merwin
Image
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
Image
On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree
W. S. Merwin
Image
Now all my teachers are dead except silence.
W. S. Merwin
Image
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
Image
come back believer in shade believer in silence and elegance believer in ferns believer in patience believer in the rain
W. S. Merwin
Image
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
Image
I needed my mistakes in their order to get me here
W. S. Merwin
Image
Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.
W. S. Merwin
Image
My cradle was a shoe.
W. S. Merwin
Image
Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.
W. S. Merwin
Image
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
Image
I have been younger in October than in all the months of spring.
W. S. Merwin
Image
From what we cannot hold the stars are made.
W. S. Merwin
Image
My words are the garment of what I shall never be Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.
W. S. Merwin
Image
we travel far and fast and as we pass through we forget where we have been
W. S. Merwin
Image
You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us
W. S. Merwin