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History, history! We fools, what do we know or care.

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
Fools
Fool
History
Care

More quotes by William Carlos Williams

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History must stay open, it is all humanity.
William Carlos Williams
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A poem is a small machine made of words. . .Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.
William Carlos Williams
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There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.
William Carlos Williams
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Liquor and love rescue the cloudy sense banish its despair give it a home.
William Carlos Williams
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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
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It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
William Carlos Williams
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The instant trivial as it is is all we have unless-unless things the imagination feeds upon, the scent of the rose, startle us anew.
William Carlos Williams
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I thought my friends were damn fools, because they didn't know any better way of conducting their lives. Still they conformed better than I to a code. I wanted to conform but I couldn't so I wrote my poetry.
William Carlos Williams
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Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery.
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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so much depends upon a red wheel barrow
William Carlos Williams
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Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact... the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.
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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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
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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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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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Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze.
William Carlos Williams
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The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard of
William Carlos Williams
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Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city.
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