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 Copy Share Image
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,… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
I also think that life itself is both indifferent to us and the source of all of our joys and everything that we love.… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
I think it's good for anybody to learn languages. Americans are particularly limited in that way. Europeans less so... We're beginning to have Spanish… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
You have to be rather relentless about pushing other things out of the way. This activity of writing, which has no promises attached to… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
Laughter was the shape the darkness took around the first appearance of the light. — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
In a sense, much that is learned is bound to be bad habits. You're always beginning again. — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
I go five steps in the garden, and I immediately lose track of time... it is a kind of joy in being alive in… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
What I really believe is the only hopeful relation between our life and the whole of life is one of reverence and respect and… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
As soon as I could write with a little pencil, I was writing these little hymns and illustrating them, and I thought they should… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
There are aspects of human life that are not purely destructive, and there is a need to pay attention to the things around us… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
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… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
We are the shadow of Sirius. There is the other side of - as we talk to each other, we see the light, and… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
Any work of art makes one very simple demand on anyone who genuinely wants to get in touch with it. And that is to… — W. S. Merwin Copy Share Image
