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On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree
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
Last
Would
World
Contemplation
Plant
Tree
Lasts
More quotes by W. S. Merwin
I have been younger in October than in all the months of spring.
W. S. Merwin
Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.
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
What you remember saves you.
W. S. Merwin
I will take with me the emptiness of my hands. What you do not have you find everywhere
W. S. Merwin
Laughter was the shape the darkness took around the first appearance of the light.
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
My words are the garment of what I shall never be Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.
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, that's not it. There are no other words in which you mean it. This is it.
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
We are not born to survive. Only to live.
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
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 not the way this setup work.
W. S. Merwin
We are the echo of the future.
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
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
Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.
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
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
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