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To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force the imagination.
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
Alone
Moment
Intensify
Force
Clarify
Moments
Refine
Live
Eternity
Eternal
Single
Imagination
More quotes by William Carlos Williams
There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.
William Carlos Williams
As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.
William Carlos Williams
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
Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.
William Carlos Williams
A poem is a small machine made of words. . .Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.
William Carlos Williams
Empty pockets make empty heads.
William Carlos Williams
No opinion can be trusted even the facts may be nothing but a printer's error.
William Carlos Williams
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
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
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
My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.
William Carlos Williams
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
Nothing whips my blood like verse.
William Carlos Williams
A poem is a small machine made out of words.
William Carlos Williams
Outside, the north wind, coming and passing, swelling and dying, lifts the frozen sand drives it a-rattle against the lidless windows and we may dear sit stroking the cat stroking the cat and smiling sleepily, prrrr.
William Carlos Williams
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter.
William Carlos Williams
Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realise his wishes- Now that he can realise them, he must either change them or perish
William Carlos Williams
Without invention nothing is well-spaced.
William Carlos Williams
O Marvelous! What new configuration will come next? I am bewildered with multiplicity.
William Carlos Williams
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
