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From what we cannot hold the stars are made.

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
Hold
Stars
Cannot
Made

More quotes by W. S. Merwin

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We are the echo of the future.
W. S. Merwin
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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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Laughter was the shape the darkness took around the first appearance of the light.
W. S. Merwin
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The attempt to live that way, the attempt to treat everybody - it fails all the time - but the attempt to treat people as equals is a good attempt. It's a very good attempt. And there have been very few governments that have come anywhere near it in the past. The Greeks began to, the Romans began to - they both failed.
W. S. Merwin
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I offer you what I have my Poverty
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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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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You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us
W. S. Merwin
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We are asleep with compasses in our hands.
W. S. Merwin
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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.
W. S. Merwin
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we travel far and fast and as we pass through we forget where we have been
W. S. Merwin
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I think there's a kind of desperate hope built into poetry that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there's still time.
W. S. Merwin
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Now all my teachers are dead except silence.
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 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
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The global warming is going on. These are not single cases. These are all part of a general way we've been looking at the world. As long as we look at the world that way it's going to go on. Because the idea that the important thing is for some people get rich while the rest of the people work for them is very deeply dug in...
W. S. Merwin
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Every year without knowing it I have passed the day When the last fires will wave to me
W. S. Merwin
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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
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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 words are the garment of what I shall never be Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.
W. S. Merwin