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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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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
Think
Necessary
Thinking
Accepting
Life
Source
Joy
Order
Also
Joys
Everything
Indifferent
Love
Accept

More quotes by 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
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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 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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We are asleep with compasses in our hands.
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
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I needed my mistakes in their order to get me here
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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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
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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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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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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
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I say to my breath once again, little breath come from in front of me, go away behind me, row me quietly now, as far as you can, for I am an abyss that I am trying to cross.
W. S. Merwin
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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
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From what we cannot hold the stars are made.
W. S. Merwin
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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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Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for
W. S. Merwin
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What you remember saves you.
W. S. Merwin
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We are not born to survive. Only to live.
W. S. Merwin
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If you can't bear what's happening to the natural world, if you can't bear the way we treat each other if you can't bear wars, you just can't bear the whole idea of war, which is possibly unavoidable. But still, you resist it. Because you just hate our treating each other that way and causing that suffering.
W. S. Merwin
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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
W. S. Merwin