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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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We sit and talk quietly, with long lapses of silence, and I am aware of the stream that has no language, coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes, which has no speech.
William Carlos Williams
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O Marvelous! What new configuration will come next? I am bewildered with multiplicity.
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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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.
William Carlos Williams
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Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.
William Carlos Williams
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Love is unworldly and nothing comes of it but love.
William Carlos Williams
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It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it there lies the secret of the ages.
William Carlos Williams
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Why do I write today? The beauty of the terrible faces of our nonentities stirs me to it: colored women day workers- old and experienced- returning home at dusk, in cast off clothing faces like old Florentine oak.
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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Nothing whips my blood like verse.
William Carlos Williams
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The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.
William Carlos Williams
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Empty pockets make empty heads.
William Carlos Williams
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A profusion of pink roses being ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring.
William Carlos Williams
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all to no end save beauty the eternal-- So in detail they, the crowd, are beautiful
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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through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones.
William Carlos Williams
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THE THOUGHTFUL LOVER Deny yourself all half things. Have it or leave it. But it will keep—or it is not worth the having. Never start anything you can't finish— However do not lose faith because you are starved! She loves you she says. Believe it —tomorrow. But today the particulars of poetry that difficult art require your whole attention.
William Carlos Williams
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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?
William Carlos Williams
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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!
William Carlos Williams
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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.
William Carlos Williams