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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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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
Death
Fires
Without
Passed
Self
Wave
Every
Fire
Years
Knowing
Year
Lasts
Last

More quotes by W. S. Merwin

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Laughter was the shape the darkness took around the first appearance of the light.
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Send me out into another life lord because this one is growing faint I do not think it goes all the way
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I have been younger in October than in all the months of spring.
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My words are the garment of what I shall never be Like the tucked sleeve of a one-armed boy.
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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.
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Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for
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My cradle was a shoe.
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Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.
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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.
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Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.
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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
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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.
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We are not born to survive. Only to live.
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Your absence has gone through me
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I offer you what I have my Poverty
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The story of each stone leads back to a mountain.
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come back believer in shade believer in silence and elegance believer in ferns believer in patience believer in the rain
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I had hardly begun to read I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write
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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...
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Now all my teachers are dead except silence.
W. S. Merwin