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Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for

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
Looking
Without
Youth
Knowing

More quotes by 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
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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.
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Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.
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From what we cannot hold the stars are made.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.
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
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But most love poetry is awful nobody knows how to write good love poetry either. But that's not a reason not to write love poetry. Some of the best poetry ever written has been love poetry, and some of the greatest poetry ever written has been political poetry.
W. S. Merwin
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I needed my mistakes in their order to get me here
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
W. S. Merwin
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I have been younger in October than in all the months of spring.
W. S. Merwin
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Any work of art makes one very simple demand on anyone who genuinely wants to get in touch with it. And that is to stop. You've got to stop what you're doing, what you're thinking, and what you're expecting and just be there for the poem for however long it takes.
W. S. Merwin
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Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for part memory part distance remaining mine in the ways that I learn to miss you from what we cannot hold the stars are made.
W. S. Merwin
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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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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