Quote

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

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
Stills
Wrote
Still
Couldn
Better
Fool
Conformed
Wanted
Poetry
Conducting
Way
Friends
Conform
Lives
Fools
Didn
Code
Thought
Damn

More quotes by William Carlos Williams

Image
Love is that common tone shall raise his fiery head and sound his note.
William Carlos Williams
Image
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
Image
Among of green stiff old bright broken branch come white sweet May again
William Carlos Williams
Image
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.
William Carlos Williams
Image
My surface is myself. Under which to witness, youth is buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.
William Carlos Williams
Image
The business of love is cruelty which, by our wills, we transform to live together.
William Carlos Williams
Image
Minds like beds always made up (more stony than a shore) unwilling or unable.
William Carlos Williams
Image
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
Image
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
Image
No opinion can be trusted even the facts may be nothing but a printer's error.
William Carlos Williams
Image
THESE are the desolate, dark weeks when nature in its barrenness equals the stupidity of man. The year plunges into night and the heart plunges lower than night.
William Carlos Williams
Image
Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.
William Carlos Williams
Image
First we have to see. Or first we have to be taught to see. We have to be taught to see here, because here is everywhere, related to everywhere else, and if we don't see, hear, taste, smell and feel in this place - not only will we never know anything but the world of sense will be by that much diminished everywhere.
William Carlos Williams
Image
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
Image
Old age is a flight of small cheeping birds skimming bare trees above a snow glaze. Gaining and failing they are buffeted by a dark wind - But what? On harsh weedstalks the flock has rested - the snow is covered with broken seed husks and the wind tempered with a shrill piping of plenty.
William Carlos Williams
Image
What love is I don't know if it's not the response of our deepest natures to one another.
William Carlos Williams
Image
What power has love but forgiveness?
William Carlos Williams
Image
You have the chicken, the hen, and the rooster. The chicken goes with the hen So who is having sex with the rooster?
William Carlos Williams
Image
Nothing whips my blood like verse.
William Carlos Williams
Image
For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation a descent follows, endless and indestructible.
William Carlos Williams