Quote

After an age of leaves and feathers someone dead thought of the mountain as money and cut the trees that were here and the wind and the rain at night. It is hard to say it.

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
Age
Trees
Night
Leaves
Money
Rain
Someone
Mountain
Thought
Cutting
Hard
Wind
Dead
Tree
Feathers

More quotes by W. S. Merwin

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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
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Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.
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We are the echo of the future.
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Every year without knowing it I have passed the day When the last fires will wave to me
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come back believer in shade believer in silence and elegance believer in ferns believer in patience believer in the rain
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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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My cradle was a shoe.
W. S. Merwin
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From what we cannot hold the stars are made.
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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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Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.
W. S. Merwin
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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.
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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
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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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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
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Laughter was the shape the darkness took around the first appearance of the light.
W. S. Merwin
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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
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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
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I also think that life itself is both indifferent to us and the source of all of our joys and everything that we love. And it's necessary to accept the one in order to love the other.
W. S. Merwin
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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
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On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree
W. S. Merwin