Quote

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

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
Fool
Truth
Merrily
Cage
Cages
Sing
Bird
Tried

More quotes by William Carlos Williams

Image
Somewhere the sense makes copper roses steel roses — The rose carried weight of love but love is at an end — of roses It is at the edge of the petal that love waits.
William Carlos Williams
Image
What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise?
William Carlos Williams
Image
The Moon, the dried weeds and the Pleiades - Seven feet tall the dark, dried weed stalks make a part of the night a red lace on the milky blue sky
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
Lifeless in appearance, sluggish dazed spring approaches They enter the new world naked, cold, uncertain of all save that they enter.
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
You lethargic, waiting upon me, waiting for the fire and I attendant upon you, shaken by your beauty Shaken by your beauty Shaken.
William Carlos Williams
Image
The business of love is cruelty which, by our wills, we transform to live together.
William Carlos Williams
Image
Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact... the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.
William Carlos Williams
Image
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
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
We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness.
William Carlos Williams
Image
I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.
William Carlos Williams
Image
My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.
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
The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard of
William Carlos Williams
Image
No opinion can be trusted even the facts may be nothing but a printer's error.
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
the set pieces of your faces stir me - leading citizens - but not in the same way.
William Carlos Williams
Image
Most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them
William Carlos Williams