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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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William Carlos Williams
Age: 79 †
Born: 1883
Born: September 17
Died: 1963
Died: March 4
Autobiographer
Literary Critic
Physician
Physician Writer
Poet
Writer
Language
Much
Never
Idiom
Offer
English
Offers
Heard
American
More quotes by William Carlos Williams
You have the chicken, the hen, and the rooster. The chicken goes with the hen So who is having sex with the rooster?
William Carlos Williams
Being an art form, verse cannot be free in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle.
William Carlos Williams
For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation a descent follows, endless and indestructible.
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
A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/...the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound.
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
I tried to put a bird in a cage. O fool that I am! For the bird was Truth. Sing merrily, Truth: I tried to put Truth in a cage!
William Carlos Williams
My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.
William Carlos Williams
all to no end save beauty the eternal-- So in detail they, the crowd, are beautiful
William Carlos Williams
And yet one arrives somehow, finds himself loosening the hooks of her dress in a strange bedroom-- feels the autumn dropping its silk and linen leaves about her ankles. The tawdry veined body emerges twisted upon itself like a winter wind.
William Carlos Williams
A poem is a small machine made out of words.
William Carlos Williams
Why do I write today? The beauty of the terrible faces of our nonentities stirs me to it: colored women day workers- old and experienced- returning home at dusk, in cast off clothing faces like old Florentine oak.
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
The only realism in art is of the imagination.
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
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
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
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
Nothing whips my blood like verse.
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
