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We are asleep with compasses in our hands.

W. S. Merwin

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W. S. Merwin
Age: 91 †
Born: 1927
Born: September 30
Died: 2019
Died: March 15
Poet
Translator
Writer
New York City
New York
William Stanley Merwin
Compasses
Compass
Asleep
Hands

More quotes by W. S. Merwin

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I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write
W. S. Merwin
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Sitting over words Very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing Not far Like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark The echo of everything that has ever Been spoken Still spinning its one syllable Between the earth and silence.
W. S. Merwin
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we travel far and fast and as we pass through we forget where we have been
W. S. Merwin
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I wouldn't be happy about being considered a love poet or an environmental - I don't want any of those tags.
W. S. Merwin
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Your absence has gone through me
W. S. Merwin
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To succeed [,] consider what is as though it were past, deem yourself inevitable and take credit for it. If you no longer believe, enlarge the temple.
W. S. Merwin
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You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us
W. S. Merwin
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What you remember saves you.
W. S. Merwin
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I say to my breath once again, little breath come from in front of me, go away behind me, row me quietly now, as far as you can, for I am an abyss that I am trying to cross.
W. S. Merwin
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Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
W. S. Merwin
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come back believer in shade believer in silence and elegance believer in ferns believer in patience believer in the rain
W. S. Merwin
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My words are the garment of what I shall never be Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.
W. S. Merwin
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My cradle was a shoe.
W. S. Merwin
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The attempt to live that way, the attempt to treat everybody - it fails all the time - but the attempt to treat people as equals is a good attempt. It's a very good attempt. And there have been very few governments that have come anywhere near it in the past. The Greeks began to, the Romans began to - they both failed.
W. S. Merwin
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We are the echo of the future.
W. S. Merwin
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What I really believe is the only hopeful relation between our life and the whole of life is one of reverence and respect and of feeling at one with it. The other attitude which is the one our society is based on is devastating and it is killing the earth and it is killing us too.
W. S. Merwin
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The global warming is going on. These are not single cases. These are all part of a general way we've been looking at the world. As long as we look at the world that way it's going to go on. Because the idea that the important thing is for some people get rich while the rest of the people work for them is very deeply dug in...
W. S. Merwin
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Every year without knowing it I have passed the day When the last fires will wave to me
W. S. Merwin
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I will take with me the emptiness of my hands. What you do not have you find everywhere
W. S. Merwin
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To say what or where we came from has nothing to do with what or where we came from. We do not come from there any more, but only from each word that proceeds out of the mouth of the unnamed. And yet sometimes it is our only way of pointing to who we are.
W. S. Merwin