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

More quotes by William Carlos Williams

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No opinion can be trusted even the facts may be nothing but a printer's error.
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One thing I am convinced more and more is true, and that is this: The only way to be truly happy is to make others happy. When you realize that and take advantage of the fact, everything is made perfect.
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My first poem was a bolt from the blue … it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. ... it filled me with soul satisfying joy.
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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.
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No ideas but in things.
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A poem is this:/A nuance of sound/delicately operating/upon a cataract of sense/...the particulars/of a song waking/upon a bed of sound.
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beauty’ is related not to ‘loveliness’ but to a state in which reality plays a part.
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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.
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What power has love but forgiveness?
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Divorce is the sign of knowledge in our time.
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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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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!
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By the road to the contagious hospital under the surge of the blue mottled clouds driven from the northeast - a cold wind.
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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.
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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.
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I have never been one to write by rule, not even by my own rules.
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Shoes twisted into incredible lilies.
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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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For the beginning is assuredly the end- since we know nothing, pure and simple, beyond our own complexities.
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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