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The War is the first and only thing in the world today. The arts generally are not, nor is this writing a diversion from that for relief, a turning away. It is the war or part of it, merely a different sector of the field.
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
World
Art
Turning
Part
Arts
Today
Generally
Firsts
Field
First
Merely
Different
Fields
Diversion
Writing
War
Sector
Thing
Away
Relief
More quotes by William Carlos Williams
When I am alone I am happy.
William Carlos Williams
Love is unworldly and nothing comes of it but love.
William Carlos Williams
Minds like beds always made up (more stony than a shore) unwilling or unable.
William Carlos Williams
But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents.
William Carlos Williams
It's the anarchy of poverty delights me, the old yellow wooden house indented among the new brick tenements
William Carlos Williams
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
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
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
O frost bitten blossoms, That are unfolding your wings From out the envious black branches. Bloom quickly and make much of the sunshine. The twigs conspire against you! Hear hem! They hold you from behind.
William Carlos Williams
It's a strange courage you give me ancient star: Shine alone in the sunrise toward which you lend no part!
William Carlos Williams
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
Most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them
William Carlos Williams
No wreaths please - especially no hothouse flowers. Some common memento is better, something he prized and is known by: his old clothes - a few books perhaps.
William Carlos Williams
It is not what you say that matters but the manner in which you say it there lies the secret of the ages.
William Carlos Williams
all to no end save beauty the eternal-- So in detail they, the crowd, are beautiful
William Carlos Williams
Liquor and love rescue the cloudy sense banish its despair give it a home.
William Carlos Williams
[History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.
William Carlos Williams
We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness.
William Carlos Williams
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
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
