Quote

Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless. - through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.

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
Writing
Stones
Invent
Things
Wait
Sharp
People
Rocks
Strike
Sleepless
Flower
Weed
Compose
Quiet
Quick
Snake
Waiting
Metaphor
Reconcile
Words
Strikes
Snakes
Ideas
Slow
Splits

More quotes by William Carlos Williams

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Hell take curtains! Go with some show of inconvenience sit openly - to the weather as to grief. Or do you think you can shut your grief in?
William Carlos Williams
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Empty pockets make empty heads.
William Carlos Williams
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A poem is a small machine made of words. . .Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.
William Carlos Williams
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The pure products of America go crazy--mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves.
William Carlos Williams
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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.
William Carlos Williams
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Divorce is the sign of knowledge in our time.
William Carlos Williams
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Remorse is a virtue in that it is a stirrer up of the emotions but it is a folly to accept it is a criticism of conduct.
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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Houses - the dark side silhouetted on flashes of moonlight!
William Carlos Williams
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A new world is only a new mind.
William Carlos Williams
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Being an art form, verse cannot be free in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle.
William Carlos Williams
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What love is I don't know if it's not the response of our deepest natures to one another.
William Carlos Williams
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Covertly the hands of a great clock go round and round! Were they to move quickly and at once the whole secret would be out and the shuffling of all ants be done forever.
William Carlos Williams
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It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time.
William Carlos Williams
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Death will be too late to bring us aid.
William Carlos Williams
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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
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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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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.
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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I think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.
William Carlos Williams