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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
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New York City
New York
William Stanley Merwin
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None
More quotes by 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
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
Now all my teachers are dead except silence.
W. S. Merwin
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
From what we cannot hold the stars are made.
W. S. Merwin
What you remember saves you.
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
On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree
W. S. Merwin
We are the echo of the future.
W. S. Merwin
The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.
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
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.
W. S. Merwin
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
Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for
W. S. Merwin
I have been younger in October than in all the months of spring.
W. S. Merwin
My cradle was a shoe.
W. S. Merwin
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
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
Laughter was the shape the darkness took around the first appearance of the light.
W. S. Merwin
You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us
W. S. Merwin