W. S. Merwin Quotes

Death is not only a passing on but a time for everyone else to truthfully reflect on one's life.

To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died, who neither listen nor speak.

It's not whether you win or lose, it's how many people remember you when you die.

I've dealt with losing close ones before, and I've been around friends that have lost friends at a young age. I think it's important to think about - not necessarily death, but about life and think about where you're going and how you want to be remembered and the legacy you want to leave.

Memory is the mother of all wisdom.

When I was a kid, I would fantasize about my own funeral.

After I die, I'll be forgotten.

The libraries, like tombs, were closed forever.

They are not dead who live in the hearts they leave behind.

It's not lost on me that everyone dies, but some people have a kind of immortality about them, and you can't imagine that they will ever be gone.

To us who remain behind is left this day of memories. Every year--in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life--there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death.

When I die, remember that what you knew of me is with you always. What is buried is only the shell of what was. Do not regret the shell, but remember the man. Remember the father.

There is nothing more terrible, I learned, than having to face the objects of a dead man. Things are inert: that have meaning only in function of the life that makes use of them. When that life ends, the things change, even though they remain the same. […] they say something to us, standing there not as objects but as remnants of thought, of consciousness, emblems of the solitude in which a man comes to make decisions about himself.

In our memories, there is a graveyard where we bury our dead. They all lie there together, the loved ones and the ones we hated, friends and foes and kin, with no distinction among them. We have to mourn every one of them, because our memories have made them as much a part of us as our bones or our skin. If we don't, we've no right to remember anything at all.

There are things to be learned even from the dead.

It has often occurred to me that a seeker after truth has to be silent.

Experience is a good teacher, but she sends in terrific bills.

All my life I've been taught how to die, but no one ever taught me how to grow old.

Many people believe that our lives end not when we die but when the very last person who knew us dies. Memory is part of it, yes, but I think it's much more than memory.

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

No parent is there forever. So I won't be here forever with these kids.

The only 'afterlife' is what other people remember of you.

Events are the best teacher for us. You try to learn from people, there is always some bend to it.

The minute we stop learning, we begin death, the process of dying. We learn from each other with every action we perform. We are teaching goodness or evil every time we step out of the house and into the street.

Most of us end up with no more than five or six people who remember us. Teachers have thousands of people who remember them for the rest of their lives.