Quotes from W. S. Merwin

What turned me into an environmentalist, on my eleventh birthday, was seeing the first strip mine.

That's a great gift to be given, that feeling of no fear.

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.

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.

The time of wisdom cannot be measured, and for me, wisdom is the garden. There is no time in the garden.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The dead will think the living are worth it we will knowWho we areAnd we will all enlist again.

Some alien blessingis on its way to us.

Now all my teachers are dead except silence.

You came back to us in a dream and we were not here.

Of course there is nothing the matter with the starsIt is my emptiness among themWhile they drift farther away in the invisible morning.

I think I was cold in the womb.

Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.

I am the son of the first fish who climbed ashore but the news has not yet reached my bowels.

Like shadowsof the plumbingthat is all that is leftof the great city.

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day.

We keep asking where they have gone those years we remember and we reach for them like hands in the night

But is it really you behind the pretenses beyond dust and distances beneath the salt and the siren announcements and ancient impurities and decays that claim to be you

a lo largo de toda la juventud te estuve buscando sin saber lo que estaba buscando

What you remember saves you.