W. S. Merwin Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• 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

  Ideas, Long, People

  "An Interview with W. S. Merwin, Poet Laureate". Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

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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

  Mouths, Who We Are, Way

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• There are poets who believe that you shouldn't engage at all in any cause. And there's something to be said for that. Because you don't want to - I think most political poetry is very bad. And it's very bad because you know too much to start with. You have a sense that you're right, and you're trying to tell other people what's right. And I think that's always kind of fundamentalism, and I don't like it.

  W. S. Merwin

  Believe, Thinking, People

  Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

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• we travel far and fast and as we pass through we forget where we have been

  W. S. Merwin

  Forget, Has Beens

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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

  Death, Fire, Self

  William Stanley Merwin, “For The Anniversary Of My Death”

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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

  Poetry, Lost, Ends

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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

  Hard Times, Rest Of Life, Tolls

  "An Interview with W. S. Merwin, Poet Laureate". Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

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• I offer you what I have my Poverty

  W. S. Merwin

  Poverty, Offers

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

  W. S. Merwin

  Spring, Months, October

  William Stanley Merwin, “The Love Of October”

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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

  Morning, Stars, Numbness

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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

  Modern, Lorca, Modern Poetry

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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

  Environmental, Want, Tag

  "An Interview with W. S. Merwin, Poet Laureate". Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

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• I think it's good for anybody to learn languages. Americans are particularly limited in that way. Europeans less so... We're beginning to have Spanish move in on English in the states because of all the people coming from Hispanic countries... and we're beginning to learn some Spanish. And I think that's a good thing... Only having one language is very limiting... You get to think that's the way the human race is made; there's only one language worth speaking... Well, this isn't good for English.

  W. S. Merwin

  Country, Moving, Thinking

  "An Interview with W. S. Merwin, Poet Laureate". Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

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• Politically it would be terribly repressive to prevent people from having as many children as they want. But something's got to prevent it; and it won't be pleasant... We're still behaving in ways that have become disastrous... I don't think this helps us to survive... We're very species-centric... and now exist at the expense of every other form of life on Earth.

  W. S. Merwin

  Children, Thinking, People

  "An Interview with W. S. Merwin, Poet Laureate". Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

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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

  Needs, Use, Never Forget

  W. S. Merwin, “Language”

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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

  Rain, Cutting, Night

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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

  W. S. Merwin

  Thinking, Growing, Way

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• We're losing a species every few seconds. We cannot put them back. If we change our mind and say, 'Oops, we made a mistake' - it's too late. This is the world we live with.

  W. S. Merwin

  Mistake, Mind, Too Late

  Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

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• Through all of youth I was looking for you without knowing what I was looking for

  W. S. Merwin

  Knowing, Youth

  "Poet W.S. Merwin". "Journal" with Bill Moyers, billmoyers.com. June 26, 2009.

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• It's an attitude of superiority. We are superior to the rest of life. The Book of Genesis says: 'Increase and multiply and have dominion over the birds of the air and the animals and so forth.' You run it; it's yours; do what you like with it. I don't know how old that text is, but it represents an attitude that probably really got going with the beginning of agriculture. Before that, the hunter-gatherers were gentler people than the agriculture.

  W. S. Merwin

  Running, Attitude, Book

  "An Interview with W. S. Merwin, Poet Laureate". Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

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• There is part of a structure in which every species is related to every other species. And they're built up on species, like a pyramid. The simpler cell organisms, and then the more complicated ones, all the way up to the mammals and birds and so forth. We call it 'developing upward'... The whole thing depends on every part of it. And we're taking out the stones from the pyramid.

  W. S. Merwin

  Cells, Pyramids, Bird

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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

  Running, Eye, Too Much

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• Through all of youth I was looking for you
  without knowing what I was looking for
  part memory part distance remaining
  mine in the ways that I learn to miss you
  from what we cannot hold the stars are made.

  W. S. Merwin

  Memories, Distance, Missing

  "Youth". Poem by W.S. Merwin, merwinconservancy.org. 2009.

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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

  Rain, Fall, Moon

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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

  Writing, Knowing, Said

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