Quotes from W.S. Merwin

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

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

How beautiful you must be to have been able to lead me this far with only the sound of your going away

from what we cannot hold the stars are made

we travel far and fast and as we pass through we forget where we have been

Tell me what you see vanishing and I will tell you who you are

Utterance" Sitting over words Very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing Not far Like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark The echo of everything that has ever Been spoken Still spinning its one syllable Between the earth and silence

You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us

My words are the garment of what I shall never be Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.

I needed my mistakes in their order to get me here

turning the pages patiently in search of meanings

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

Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.

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

I am an abyss that I am trying to cross.