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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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William Carlos Williams
Age: 79 †
Born: 1883
Born: September 17
Died: 1963
Died: March 4
Autobiographer
Literary Critic
Physician
Physician Writer
Poet
Writer
Imagination
Living
History
Soul
Tyranny
Souls
Dead

More quotes by William Carlos Williams

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Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless. - through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.
William Carlos Williams
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I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.
William Carlos Williams
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Most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them
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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Sure love is cruel and selfish and totally obtuse-- at least, blinded by the light, young love is.
William Carlos Williams
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It was the love of love, the love of swallows up all else, a grateful love, a love of natural, of people, of animals, a love ingengering gentleness and goodness that moved meand that I saw in you
William Carlos Williams
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The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
William Carlos Williams
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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
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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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The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets.
William Carlos Williams
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Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.
William Carlos Williams
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A poem is a small machine made out of words.
William Carlos Williams
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Divorce is the sign of knowledge in our time.
William Carlos Williams
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No opinion can be trusted even the facts may be nothing but a printer's error.
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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History must stay open, it is all humanity.
William Carlos Williams
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Love is a young green willow shimmering at the bare wood's edge
William Carlos Williams
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If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,-- Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?
William Carlos Williams
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Without invention nothing is well-spaced.
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