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
None
Lost

More quotes by 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
W. S. Merwin
Image
I offer you what I have my Poverty
W. S. Merwin
Image
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
Image
We are asleep with compasses in our hands.
W. S. Merwin
Image
Your absence has gone through me
W. S. Merwin
Image
What you remember saves you.
W. S. Merwin
Image
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
Image
We are the echo of the future.
W. S. Merwin
Image
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
Image
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day When the last fires will wave to me
W. S. Merwin
Image
I needed my mistakes in their order to get me here
W. S. Merwin
Image
My cradle was a shoe.
W. S. Merwin
Image
I will take with me the emptiness of my hands. What you do not have you find everywhere
W. S. Merwin
Image
Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
W. S. Merwin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
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
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