Quotes from W. S. Merwin

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.

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.

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.

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

come back believer in shade believer in silence and elegance believer in ferns believer in patience believer in the rain

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.

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.

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.

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.

We are not born to survive. Only to live.

Democracy's got endless problems and faults and dangers, but it's certain the alternatives are not better.

Send me out into another life lord because this one is growing faint I do not think it goes all the way

Now all my teachers are dead except silence.

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.

Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.

In a sense, much that is learned is bound to be bad habits. You're always beginning again.

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.

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.

We are asleep with compasses in our hands.

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.

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.

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.

On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree

I wouldn't be happy about being considered a love poet or an environmental - I don't want any of those tags.