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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
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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
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Almost
Belief
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Define
Believe
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Time
Impossible
More quotes by 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.
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.
William Carlos Williams
Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky. Your knees are a southern breeze.
William Carlos Williams
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
That which is possible is inevitable.
William Carlos Williams
My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.
William Carlos Williams
The pure products of America go crazy--mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves.
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.
William Carlos Williams
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
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.
William Carlos Williams
Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.
William Carlos Williams
Sunshine of late afternoon-- On the glass tray a glass pitcher, the tumbler turned down, by which a key is lying--And the immaculate white bed
William Carlos Williams
Sure love is cruel and selfish and totally obtuse-- at least, blinded by the light, young love is.
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.
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.
William Carlos Williams
Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy.
William Carlos Williams
History, history! We fools, what do we know or care.
William Carlos Williams
One thing I am convinced more and more is true, and that is this: The only way to be truly happy is to make others happy. When you realize that and take advantage of the fact, everything is made perfect.
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.
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.
William Carlos Williams
