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If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.

William Carlos Williams

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William Carlos Williams
Age: 79 †
Born: 1883
Born: September 17
Died: 1963
Died: March 4
Autobiographer
Literary Critic
Physician
Physician Writer
Poet
Writer
Poem
Pleasure

More quotes by William Carlos Williams

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Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze. Gaining and failing they are buffeted by a dark wind - But what? On harsh weedstalks the flock has rested - the snow is covered with broken seed husks and the wind tempered with a shrill piping of plenty.
William Carlos Williams
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History, history! We fools, what do we know or care.
William Carlos Williams
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For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation a descent follows, endless and indestructible.
William Carlos Williams
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There is nothing beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its own seasons reversing the usual order at will.
William Carlos Williams
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You lethargic, waiting upon me, waiting for the fire and I attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty Shaken by your beauty Shaken.
William Carlos Williams
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My first poem was a bolt from the blue … it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. ... it filled me with soul satisfying joy.
William Carlos Williams
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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.
William Carlos Williams
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beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.
William Carlos Williams
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The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
William Carlos Williams
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Houses - the dark side silhouetted on flashes of moonlight!
William Carlos Williams
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The instant trivial as it is is all we have unless-unless things the imagination feeds upon, the scent of the rose, startle us anew.
William Carlos Williams
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For the beginning is assuredly the end- since we know nothing, pure and simple, beyond our own complexities.
William Carlos Williams
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No wreaths please - especially no hothouse flowers. Some common memento is better, something he prized and is known by: his old clothes - a few books perhaps.
William Carlos Williams
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Sometimes I find myself thinking, rather wistfully, about Lao Tzu's famous dictum: 'Govern a great nation as you would cook a small fish.' All around me I see something very different, let us say - a number of angry dwarfs trying to grill a whale.
William Carlos Williams
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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.
William Carlos Williams
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Liquor and love rescue the cloudy sense banish its despair give it a home.
William Carlos Williams
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Nothing whips my blood like verse.
William Carlos Williams
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the set pieces of your faces stir me - leading citizens - but not in the same way.
William Carlos Williams
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Somewhere the sense makes copper roses steel roses — The rose carried weight of love but love is at an end — of roses It is at the edge of the petal that love waits.
William Carlos Williams
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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.
William Carlos Williams