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The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.

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
Authentic
Poet
Language
Use
Jobs
Effectively

More quotes by William Carlos Williams

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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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That which is possible is inevitable.
William Carlos Williams
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There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.
William Carlos Williams
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But the sea which no one tends is also a garden
William Carlos Williams
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All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts.
William Carlos Williams
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O Marvelous! What new configuration will come next? I am bewildered with multiplicity.
William Carlos Williams
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Divorce is the sign of knowledge in our time.
William Carlos Williams
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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.
William Carlos Williams
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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.
William Carlos Williams
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Shoes twisted into incredible lilies.
William Carlos Williams
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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
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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.
William Carlos Williams
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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
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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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Either I exist or I do not exist, and no amount of pap which I happen to be lapping can dull me to the loss.
William Carlos Williams
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A new music is a new mind.
William Carlos Williams
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As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.
William Carlos Williams
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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
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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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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