Quote

We are the echo of the future.

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
Echo
Echoes
Future

More quotes by W. S. Merwin

Image
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
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
come back believer in shade believer in silence and elegance believer in ferns believer in patience believer in the rain
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'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
Your absence has gone through me
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
What you remember saves you.
W. S. Merwin
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars It is my emptiness among them While they drift farther away in the invisible morning
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
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 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
Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for
W. S. Merwin
Image
we travel far and fast and as we pass through we forget where we have been
W. S. Merwin
Image
We are asleep with compasses in our hands.
W. S. Merwin
Image
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
Image
The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.
W. S. Merwin
Image
Laughter was the shape the darkness took around the first appearance of the light.
W. S. Merwin