Quote

[History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.

William Carlos Williams

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by William Carlos Williams

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
History must stay open, it is all humanity.
William Carlos Williams
Image
Say it, no ideas but in things - nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees bent, forked by preconception and accident - split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained - secret - into the body of the light!
William Carlos Williams
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
One by one the objects are defined? It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf But now the stark dignity of entrance?Still, the profound change has come upon them: rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken.
William Carlos Williams
Image
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
Image
The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard of
William Carlos Williams
Image
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
Image
the set pieces of your faces stir me - leading citizens - but not in the same way.
William Carlos Williams
Image
I think these days when there is so little to believe in——when the old loyalties——God, country, and the hope of Heaven——aren't very real, we are more dependent than we should be on our friends. The only thing left to believe in——someone who seems beautiful.
William Carlos Williams
Image
But time in only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there'll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.
William Carlos Williams
Image
A profusion of pink roses being ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring.
William Carlos Williams
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I will teach you my townspeople how to perform a funeral for you have it over a troop of artists unless one should scour the world you have the ground sense necessary.
William Carlos Williams