Alive Quote by W. S. Merwin

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

We are not born to survive. Only to live.

— W. S. Merwin

What you remember saves you.

— W. S. Merwin

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

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

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

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

— W. S. Merwin

In a sense, much that is learned is bound to be bad habits. You're always beginning again.

— W. S. Merwin

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

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

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

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