W. S. Merwin
The time of wisdom cannot be measured, and for me, wisdom is the garden. There is no time in the garden.Collection: Wisdom
I can't imagine ever writing anything of any kind on a machine. I never tried to write either poetry or prose on a typewriter. I like to do it on useless paper, scrap paper, because it's of no importance.Collection: Poetry
What turned me into an environmentalist, on my eleventh birthday, was seeing the first strip mine.Collection: Birthday
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.Collection: Poetry
We are asleep with compasses in our hands.
What a great poem teaches you - and it's not intellectual at all - is the resonance in the language that's heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language.
I go five steps in the garden, and I immediately lose track of time... it is a kind of joy in being alive in being in the world. I always found that in the garden. That is what it means to me.
I think this is one of the benefits of getting older: that one has that perspective on things farther away. One is so caught up in middle years in the idea of accomplishing something when, in fact, the full accomplishment is always with one.
That's a great gift to be given, that feeling of no fear.
Democracy's got endless problems and faults and dangers, but it's certain the alternatives are not better.
I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing - an effort to try to express something that is inexpressible.
Now all my teachers are dead except silence.
I think memory is essential to what we are. If we - we wouldn't be able to talk to each other without memory. And what we think of as the present really is the past. It is made out of the past.
I am too conscious of being an American to accept public congratulation with good grace or to welcome it except as an occasion for expressing openly a shame which many Americans feel, day after day, helplessly and in silence.
The Indians seemed to be living in a place and in a way that was of immense importance to me. So I associate learning to read - English, oddly enough - with wanting to know about Indians. I'm still growing into it. I've never outgrown that.
The kind of writing that matters most to me is something you don't learn about. It's constantly coming out of what I don't know rather than what I do know.
In a sense, much that is learned is bound to be bad habits. You're always beginning again.
You have to be rather relentless about pushing other things out of the way. This activity of writing, which has no promises attached to it, comes to be given a kind of arbitrary but persistent importance.
As a child, I used to have a secret dread - and a recurring nightmare - of the whole world becoming city, being covered with cement and buildings and streets. No more country. No more woods.
The past is always - one moment it's what happened three minutes ago, and one minute it's what happened 30 years ago. And they flow into each other in ways that we can't predict and that we keep discovering in dreams, which keep bringing up feelings and moments, some of which we never actually saw.
The idea of writing, to me, was, from the beginning, was writing something which was a little different from the ordinary exchange of speech. It was something that had a certain formality, something in which the words were of interest in themselves.
He said you should write about 75 lines every day. You know, Pound was a great one for laying down the law about how you did anything.
We are the shadow of Sirius. There is the other side of - as we talk to each other, we see the light, and we see these faces, but we know that behind that, there's the other side, which we never know. And that - it's the dark, the unknown side that guides us, and that is part of our lives all the time. It's the mystery.
The Arab world is erupting, which is extraordinary, and to see it happen is like watching rings spreading on a pool - it goes out; it varies so much. The spontaneity is wonderful, but very often, if it's not well organized, it breaks up, and it peters out.
Jeffersonian democracy, faulty as it is, and only the fragment of it that we have, is a thing of such preciousness, a thing of such value.
As soon as I could write with a little pencil, I was writing these little hymns and illustrating them, and I thought they should be sung in church, but they never were.
We are not born to survive. Only to live.Collection: Life
Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.Collection: I Miss You
Obviously a garden is not the wilderness but an assembly of shapes, most of them living, that owes some share of its composition, it’s appearance, to human design and effort, human conventions and convenience, and the human pursuit of that elusive, indefinable harmony that we call beauty. It has a life of its own, an intricate, willful, secret life, as any gardener knows. It is only the humans in it who think of it as a garden. But a garden is a relationship, which is one of the countless reasons why it is never finished.Collection: Garden
On the last day of the world I would want to plant a treeCollection: Tree
From what we cannot hold the stars are made.Collection: Stars
I needed my mistakes in their order to get me hereCollection: Mistake
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Going Away
Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.Collection: Art
Your absence has gone through meCollection: Missing You
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.Collection: Thinking
The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.Collection: Mountain
What you remember saves you.Collection: Remember
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.Collection: Attitude
Laughter was the shape the darkness took around the first appearance of the light.Collection: Laughter
I will take with me the emptiness of my hands. What you do not have you find everywhereCollection: Hands
We are the echo of the future.Collection: Future
I have with me all that I do not knowI have lost none of it.Collection: Lost
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.Collection: Thinking
come back believer in shade believer in silence and elegance believer in ferns believer in patience believer in the rainCollection: Rain
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...Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: Moving