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I have with me all that I do not knowI have lost none of 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
None
Lost

More quotes by 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
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I will take with me the emptiness of my hands. What you do not have you find everywhere
W. S. Merwin
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We are the echo of the future.
W. S. Merwin
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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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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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To say what or where we came from has nothing to do with what or where we came from. We do not come from there any more, but only from each word that proceeds out of the mouth of the unnamed. And yet sometimes it is our only way of pointing to who we are.
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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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
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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
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From what we cannot hold the stars are made.
W. S. Merwin
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My cradle was a shoe.
W. S. Merwin
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I offer you what I have my Poverty
W. S. Merwin
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The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.
W. S. Merwin
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Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.
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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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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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
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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.
W. S. Merwin
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We are not born to survive. Only to live.
W. S. Merwin
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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
W. S. Merwin