W.S. Merwin quotes

We are asleep with compasses in our hands. (W.S. Merwin)
Send me out into another life lord because this one is growing faint I do not think it goes all the way.
W.S. Merwin
My words are the garment of what I shall never be Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.
W.S. Merwin
Now all my teachers are dead except silence.
W.S. Merwin
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.
W.S. Merwin
On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree.
W.S. Merwin
Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.
W.S. Merwin
Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for.
W.S. Merwin
The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.
W.S. Merwin
we travel far and fast and as we pass through we forget where we have been.
W.S. Merwin
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. (W.S. Merwin)
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
Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.
W.S. Merwin
What you remember saves you.
W.S. Merwin
Tell me what you see vanishing and I will tell you who you are.
W.S. Merwin
part memory part distance remaining mine in the ways that I learn to miss you.
W.S. Merwin
come back believer in shade believer in silence and elegance believer in ferns believer in patience believer in the rain.
W.S. Merwin
How beautiful you must be to have been able to lead me this far with only the sound of your going away.
W.S. Merwin
You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us.
W.S. Merwin