108 Quotes by W. S. Merwin

Your absence has gone through me.

I offer you what I have my Poverty.

But most love poetry is awful; nobody knows how to write good love poetry either. But that’s not a reason not to write love poetry. Some of the best poetry ever written has been love poetry, and some of the greatest poetry ever written has been political poetry.

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.

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

When a poem is really finished, you can’t change anything. You can’t move words around. You can’t say, ‘In other words, you mean.’ No, that’s not it. There are no other words in which you mean it. This is it.

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.

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.

There are aspects of human life that are not purely destructive, and there is a need to pay attention to the things around us while they are still around us. And you know, in a way, if you don’t pay that attention, the anger is just bitterness.