Best 138 quotes of William Carlos Williams on MyQuotes

William Carlos Williams

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    William Carlos Williams

    Afraid lest he be caught up in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated-thrown aside-a man hesitates to write down his innermost convictions.

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    William Carlos Williams

    all to no end save beauty the eternal-- So in detail they, the crowd, are beautiful

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    William Carlos Williams

    All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts.

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    William Carlos Williams

    Among of green stiff old bright broken branch come white sweet May again

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    William Carlos Williams

    and there grows in the mind a scent, it may be, of locust blossoms whose perfume is itself a wind moving to lead the mind away.

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    William Carlos Williams

    And yet one arrives somehow, finds himself loosening the hooks of her dress in a strange bedroom-- feels the autumn dropping its silk and linen leaves about her ankles. The tawdry veined body emerges twisted upon itself like a winter wind.

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    William Carlos Williams

    A new music is a new mind.

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    William Carlos Williams

    A new world is only a new mind.

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    William Carlos Williams

    A poem is a small machine made of words. . .Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.

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    William Carlos Williams

    A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/...the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound.

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    William Carlos Williams

    A profusion of pink roses being ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring.

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    William Carlos Williams

    As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.

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    William Carlos Williams

    As the rain falls so does your love bathe every open object of the world

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    William Carlos Williams

    At our age the imagination across the sorry facts lifts us to make roses stand before thorns. Sure love is cruel and selfish and totally obtuse— at least, blinded by the light, young love is. But we are older, I to love and you to be loved, we have, no matter how, by our wills survived to keep the jeweled prize always at our finger tips. We will it so and so it is past all accident.

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    William Carlos Williams

    beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.

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    William Carlos Williams

    Being an art form, verse cannot be "free" in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle.

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    William Carlos Williams

    But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents.

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    William Carlos Williams

    But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus this so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life.

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    William Carlos Williams

    But time in only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there'll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.

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    William Carlos Williams

    By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency.

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    William Carlos Williams

    By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast - a cold wind.

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    William Carlos Williams

    Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.

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    William Carlos Williams

    Covertly the hands of a great clock go round and round! Were they to move quickly and at once the whole secret would be out and the shuffling of all ants be done forever.

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    William Carlos Williams

    Danse Russe If I when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees,-- if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: "I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so!" If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,-- Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?

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    William Carlos Williams

    Death will be too late to bring us aid.

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    William Carlos Williams

    Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.

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    William Carlos Williams

    Divorce is the sign of knowledge in our time.

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    William Carlos Williams

    Each speech having its own character, the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form. The effect is beauty, what in a single object resolves our complex feelings of propriety.

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    William Carlos Williams

    Empty pockets make empty heads.

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    William Carlos Williams

    Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.

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    William Carlos Williams

    First we have to see. Or first we have to be taught to see. We have to be taught to see here, because here is everywhere, related to everywhere else, and if we don't see, hear, taste, smell and feel in this place - not only will we never know anything but the world of sense will be by that much diminished everywhere.

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    William Carlos Williams

    For the beginning is assuredly the end- since we know nothing, pure and simple, beyond our own complexities.

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    William Carlos Williams

    For there is a wind or a ghost of wind in all books echoing the life there, a high wind that fills the tubes of the ear until we think we hear a wind, actual.

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    William Carlos Williams

    For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation a descent follows, endless and indestructible.

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    William Carlos Williams

    Hell take curtains! Go with some show of inconvenience; sit openly - to the weather as to grief. Or do you think you can shut your grief in?

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    William Carlos Williams

    [History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.

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    William Carlos Williams

    History must stay open, it is all humanity.

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    William Carlos Williams

    Houses - the dark side silhouetted on flashes of moonlight!

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    William Carlos Williams

    I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.

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    William Carlos Williams

    Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.

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    William Carlos Williams

    In summer, the song sings itself.

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    William Carlos Williams

    I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.

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    William Carlos Williams

    I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.

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    William Carlos Williams

    I think of the poetry of René Char and all he must have seen and suffered that has brought him to speak only of sedgy rivers, of daffodils and tulips whose roots they water, even to the free-flowing river that laves the rootlets of those sweet-scented flowers that people the milky way

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    William Carlos Williams

    I think these days when there is so little to believe in——when the old loyalties——God, country, and the hope of Heaven——aren't very real, we are more dependent than we should be on our friends. The only thing left to believe in——someone who seems beautiful.

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    William Carlos Williams

    I thought my friends were damn fools, because they didn't know any better way of conducting their lives. Still they conformed better than I to a code. I wanted to conform but I couldn't so I wrote my poetry.

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    William Carlos Williams

    It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time.

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    William Carlos Williams

    It is difficult to get the news from poetry, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

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    William Carlos Williams

    It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater.

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    William Carlos Williams

    I tried to put a bird in a cage. O fool that I am! For the bird was Truth. Sing merrily, Truth: I tried to put Truth in a cage!