The Indians seemed to be living in a place and in a way that was of immense importance to me. So I associate learning to read – English, oddly enough – with wanting to know about Indians. I’m still growing into it. I’ve never outgrown that. W. S. Merwin Read Quote
I am too conscious of being an American to accept public congratulation with good grace or to welcome it except as an occasion for expressing openly a shame which many Americans feel, day after day, helplessly and in silence. W. S. Merwin Read Quote
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 Read Quote
As a child, I used to have a secret dread – and a recurring nightmare – of the whole world becoming city, being covered with cement and buildings and streets. No more country. No more woods. W. S. Merwin Read Quote
The past is always – one moment it’s what happened three minutes ago, and one minute it’s what happened 30 years ago. And they flow into each other in ways that we can’t predict and that we keep discovering in dreams, which keep bringing up feelings and moments, some of which we never actually saw. W. S. Merwin Read Quote
We are the shadow of Sirius. There is the other side of – as we talk to each other, we see the light, and we see these faces, but we know that behind that, there’s the other side, which we never know. And that – it’s the dark, the unknown side that guides us, and that is part of our lives all the time. It’s the mystery. W. S. Merwin Read Quote
The idea of writing, to me, was, from the beginning, was writing something which was a little different from the ordinary exchange of speech. It was something that had a certain formality, something in which the words were of interest in themselves. W. S. Merwin Read Quote
The kind of writing that matters most to me is something you don’t learn about. It’s constantly coming out of what I don’t know rather than what I do know. W. S. Merwin Read Quote
