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I have been younger in October than in all the months of spring.

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
October
Younger
Spring
Months

More quotes by W. S. Merwin

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My cradle was a shoe.
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 will take with me the emptiness of my hands. What you do not have you find everywhere
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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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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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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I needed my mistakes in their order to get me here
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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We are not born to survive. Only to live.
W. S. Merwin
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From what we cannot hold the stars are made.
W. S. Merwin
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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
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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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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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The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.
W. S. Merwin
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Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.
W. S. Merwin
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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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we travel far and fast and as we pass through we forget where we have been
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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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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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