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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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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
Stars
Drift
Morning
Detachment
Away
Farther
Nothing
Emptiness
Matter
Invisible
Among
Courses
Course
Numbness

More quotes by W. S. Merwin

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We are not born to survive. Only to live.
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My cradle was a shoe.
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Every year without knowing it I have passed the day When the last fires will wave to me
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Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for
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Separation Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color.
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From what we cannot hold the stars are made.
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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.
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I have been younger in October than in all the months of spring.
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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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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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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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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
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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 needed my mistakes in their order to get me here
W. S. Merwin
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We are asleep with compasses in our hands.
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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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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You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us
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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What you remember saves you.
W. S. Merwin