W. S. Merwin Quotes

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.

I have been younger in October than in all the months of spring.

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.

Laughter was the shape the darkness took around the first appearance of the light.

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.

What you remember saves you.

This is what I have heard at last the wind in December lashing the old trees with rain unseen rain racing along the tiles under the moon wind rising and falling wind with many clouds trees in the night wind.

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 needed my mistakes in their order to get me here

We’re losing a species every few seconds. We cannot put them back. If we change our mind and say, ‘Oops, we made a mistake’ – it’s too late. This is the world we live with.

It’s an attitude of superiority. We are superior to the rest of life. The Book of Genesis says: ‘Increase and multiply and have dominion over the birds of the air and the animals and so forth.’ You run it; it’s yours; do what you like with it. I don’t know how old that text is, but it represents an attitude that probably really got going with the beginning of agriculture. Before that, the hunter-gatherers were gentler people than the agriculture.

The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.