108 Quotes by W. S. Merwin

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

I needed my mistakes in their order to get me here

In the time that I have been acquainted with this region I have become increasingly aware of it as a testament of water, the origin and guide of its contours and gradients and of all the lives - the plants and small creatures, and the culture - that evolved here. That was always here to be seen, of course, and the recognition has forced itself, in one form or other, upon people in every part of the world who have been directly involved with the growing of living things. The gardener who ignores it is soon left with no garden.

part memory part distance remaining mine in the ways that I learn to miss you

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

I offer you what I have my Poverty

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

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

To say what or where we came from has nothing to do with what or where we came from. We do not come from there any more, but only from each word that proceeds out of the mouth of the unnamed. And yet sometimes it is our only way of pointing to who we are.