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

More quotes by 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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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
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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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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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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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I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.
William Carlos Williams
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A new world is only a new mind.
William Carlos Williams
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Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky. Your knees are a southern breeze.
William Carlos Williams
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The only human value of anything, writing included, is intense vision of the facts.
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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Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.
William Carlos Williams
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Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.
William Carlos Williams
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Either I exist or I do not exist, and no amount of pap which I happen to be lapping can dull me to the loss.
William Carlos Williams
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Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.
William Carlos Williams
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O frost bitten blossoms, That are unfolding your wings From out the envious black branches. Bloom quickly and make much of the sunshine. The twigs conspire against you! Hear hem! They hold you from behind.
William Carlos Williams
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My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.
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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Who isn't frustrated and does not prove it by his actions - if you want to say so? But through art the psychologically maimed may become the most distinguished man of his age. Take Freud for instance.
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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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