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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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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
Garments
Armed
Boys
Shall
Words
Tucked
Never
Sleeve
Like
Garment
Sleeves
More quotes by W. S. Merwin
The moment we turn over the soil we start poisoning it and we go on poisoning it all the way through... and there's probably not a river in the United States that doesn't have pesticide poisoning in it. The fish are dying. The seas are getting polluted. All of these things are happening. The rain forests are going. That's what the context is.
W. S. Merwin
come back believer in shade believer in silence and elegance believer in ferns believer in patience believer in the rain
W. S. Merwin
Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.
W. S. Merwin
I think there's a kind of desperate hope built into poetry that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there's still time.
W. S. Merwin
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
You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us
W. S. Merwin
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
If you can't bear what's happening to the natural world, if you can't bear the way we treat each other if you can't bear wars, you just can't bear the whole idea of war, which is possibly unavoidable. But still, you resist it. Because you just hate our treating each other that way and causing that suffering.
W. S. Merwin
So this is what I am Pondering his eyes that could not Conceive that I was a creature to run from I who have always believed too much in words
W. S. Merwin
We're losing a species every few seconds. We cannot put them back. If we change our mind and say, 'Oops, we made a mistake' - it's too late. This is the world we live with.
W. S. Merwin
I offer you what I have my Poverty
W. S. Merwin
Certain words now in our knowledge we will not use again, and we will never forget them. We need them. Like the back of the picture.
W. S. Merwin
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
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
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
we travel far and fast and as we pass through we forget where we have been
W. S. Merwin
I'm very pessimistic about the future of the human species. We have been so indifferent to life on the whole that it will take its toll. It's not just the polar bears that are having a hard time what we're doing is gradually impoverishing and poisoning the whole of the rest of life.
W. S. Merwin
I have with me all that I do not knowI have lost none of it.
W. S. Merwin
Of course there is nothing the matter with the stars It is my emptiness among them While they drift farther away in the invisible morning
W. S. Merwin
This is what I have heard at last the wind in December lashing the old trees with rain unseen rain racing along the tiles under the moon wind rising and falling wind with many clouds trees in the night wind.
W. S. Merwin
