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We are the echo of the future.

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
Echo
Echoes
Future

More quotes by W. S. Merwin

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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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Laughter was the shape the darkness took around the first appearance of the light.
W. S. Merwin
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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.
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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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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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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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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I needed my mistakes in their order to get me here
W. S. Merwin
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Now all my teachers are dead except silence.
W. S. Merwin
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From what we cannot hold the stars are made.
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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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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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
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come back believer in shade believer in silence and elegance believer in ferns believer in patience believer in the rain
W. S. Merwin
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We are not born to survive. Only to live.
W. S. Merwin
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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
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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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I offer you what I have my Poverty
W. S. Merwin
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Your absence has gone through me
W. S. Merwin