Quote

Now all my teachers are dead except silence.

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
Teachers
Except
Silence
Dead
Teacher

More quotes by 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
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
Image
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day When the last fires will wave to me
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
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
If you can't bear what's happening to the natural world, if you can't bear the way we treat each other if you can't bear wars, you just can't bear the whole idea of war, which is possibly unavoidable. But still, you resist it. Because you just hate our treating each other that way and causing that suffering.
W. S. Merwin
Image
The global warming is going on. These are not single cases. These are all part of a general way we've been looking at the world. As long as we look at the world that way it's going to go on. Because the idea that the important thing is for some people get rich while the rest of the people work for them is very deeply dug in...
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
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
Laughter was the shape the darkness took around the first appearance of the light.
W. S. Merwin
Image
I have with me all that I do not knowI have lost none of it.
W. S. Merwin
Image
The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.
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
You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us
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
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
Image
Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.
W. S. Merwin