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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
Tyranny
Souls
Dead
Imagination
Living
History
Soul

More quotes by William Carlos Williams

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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.
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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.
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Nothing whips my blood like verse.
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The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned
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It's the anarchy of poverty delights me, the old yellow wooden house indented among the new brick tenements
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The only realism in art is of the imagination.
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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.
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A new world is only a new mind.
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We sit and talk quietly, with long lapses of silence, and I am aware of the stream that has no language, coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes, which has no speech.
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Love is unworldly and nothing comes of it but love.
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Who isn't frustrated and does not prove it by his actions - if you want to say so? But through art the psychologically maimed may become the most distinguished man of his age. Take Freud for instance.
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There is no comment on pictures but pictures, on music but music, on poems but poetry. If you do, you do. If you don't, you don't. And that's all there is to that.
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I think of the poetry of René Char and all he must have seen and suffered that has brought him to speak only of sedgy rivers, of daffodils and tulips whose roots they water, even to the free-flowing river that laves the rootlets of those sweet-scented flowers that people the milky way
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so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.
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The poem springs from the half spoken words of the patient.... When asked, how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem, I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing.
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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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all to no end save beauty the eternal-- So in detail they, the crowd, are beautiful
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Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.
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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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Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.
William Carlos Williams