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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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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
Past
Temple
Take
Temples
Believe
Inevitable
Credit
Consider
Succeed
Longer
Deem
Though
Enlarge
More quotes by W. S. Merwin
My cradle was a shoe.
W. S. Merwin
When a poem is really finished, you can't change anything. You can't move words around. You can't say, 'In other words, you mean.' No, that's not it. There are no other words in which you mean it. This is it.
W. S. Merwin
From what we cannot hold the stars are made.
W. S. Merwin
I will take with me the emptiness of my hands. What you do not have you find everywhere
W. S. Merwin
We are not born to survive. Only to live.
W. S. Merwin
If there'd been a better-balanced society, where there were other ways of making a decent living, I think it might have been different. That's not the way this setup work.
W. S. Merwin
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
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
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
Send me out into another life lord because this one is growing faint I do not think it goes all the way
W. S. Merwin
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
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
Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you've lost the whole thing.
W. S. Merwin
Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for
W. S. Merwin
we travel far and fast and as we pass through we forget where we have been
W. S. Merwin
We are the echo of the future.
W. S. Merwin
Modern poetry, for me, began not in English at all but in Spanish, in the poems of Lorca.
W. S. Merwin
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
Laughter was the shape the darkness took around the first appearance of the light.
W. S. Merwin
You grieve Not that heaven does not exist but That it exists without us
W. S. Merwin
