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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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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
Back
Come
Ferns
Elegance
Shade
Believer
Patience
Rain
Silence
More quotes by 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
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
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
I have with me all that I do not knowI have lost none of it.
W. S. Merwin
Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.
W. S. Merwin
Send me out into another life lord because this one is growing faint I do not think it goes all the way
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
From what we cannot hold the stars are made.
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
There are aspects of human life that are not purely destructive, and there is a need to pay attention to the things around us while they are still around us. And you know, in a way, if you don't pay that attention, the anger is just bitterness.
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
The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.
W. S. Merwin
I have been younger in October than in all the months of spring.
W. S. Merwin
We are asleep with compasses in our hands.
W. S. Merwin
You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us
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
We are not born to survive. Only to live.
W. S. Merwin
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
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
Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for
W. S. Merwin
