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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
Soul
Tyranny
Souls
Dead
Imagination
Living
History

More quotes by William Carlos Williams

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When I am alone I am happy.
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so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.
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A new music is a new mind.
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We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness.
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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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Among of green stiff old bright broken branch come white sweet May again
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the set pieces of your faces stir me - leading citizens - but not in the same way.
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all to no end save beauty the eternal-- So in detail they, the crowd, are beautiful
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I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.
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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.
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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.
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What power has love but forgiveness?
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The only realism in art is of the imagination.
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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.
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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.
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The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets.
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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.
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What can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision, so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past.
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The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.
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