Quote

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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William Carlos Williams
Age: 79 †
Born: 1883
Born: September 17
Died: 1963
Died: March 4
Autobiographer
Literary Critic
Physician
Physician Writer
Poet
Writer
Never
Difficult
Lose
Require
Keep
Leave
Deny
Art
Says
Lovers
Today
Loses
Loves
Particulars
Anything
Start
However
Starved
Whole
Attention
Poetry
Thoughtful
Believe
Half
Tomorrow
Lover
Things
Faith
Worth
Finish

More quotes by William Carlos Williams

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The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
William Carlos Williams
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Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.
William Carlos Williams
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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
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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
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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.
William Carlos Williams
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The War is the first and only thing in the world today. The arts generally are not, nor is this writing a diversion from that for relief, a turning away. It is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of the field.
William Carlos Williams
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The pure products of America go crazy
William Carlos Williams
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If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.
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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Without invention nothing is well-spaced.
William Carlos Williams
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through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones.
William Carlos Williams
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By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast - a cold wind.
William Carlos Williams
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[History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.
William Carlos Williams
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It's the anarchy of poverty delights me, the old yellow wooden house indented among the new brick tenements
William Carlos Williams
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It's a strange courage you give me ancient star: Shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no part!
William Carlos Williams
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Remorse is a virtue in that it is a stirrer up of the emotions but it is a folly to accept it is a criticism of conduct.
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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Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.
William Carlos Williams
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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.
William Carlos Williams
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No ideas but in things.
William Carlos Williams