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

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

More quotes by William Carlos Williams

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If it ain't a pleasure, it ain't a poem.
William Carlos Williams
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There is no comment on pictures but pictures, on music but music, on poems but poetry. If you do, you do. If you don't, you don't. And that's all there is to that.
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Unless there is a new mind there cannot be a new line, the old will go on repeating itself with recurring deadliness
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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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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
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Sorrow is my own yard where the new grass flames as it has flamed often before but not with the cold fire that closes round me this year.
William Carlos Williams
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Why do I write today? The beauty of the terrible faces of our nonentities stirs me to it: colored women day workers- old and experienced- returning home at dusk, in cast off clothing faces like old Florentine oak.
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Sure love is cruel and selfish and totally obtuse-- at least, blinded by the light, young love is.
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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
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For there is a wind or a ghost of wind in all books echoing the life there, a high wind that fills the tubes of the ear until we think we hear a wind, actual.
William Carlos Williams
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so much depends upon a red wheel barrow
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That which is possible is inevitable.
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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
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we, in that instant, lost, breathless to be witnesses, as if we stood ourselves refreshed among the shining fauna of that fire.
William Carlos Williams
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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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It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
William Carlos Williams
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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
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I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.
William Carlos Williams
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Poets are being pursued by the philosophers today, out of the poverty of philosophy. God damn it, you might think a man had no business to be writing, to be a poet unless some philosophic stinker gave him permission.
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