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Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matters like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy.

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
Economy
Ships
Perfect
Ill
May
Machine
Matter
Defined
Pruned
Like
Machines
Drives
Carry
Load
Matters
Ship
Poetry
Prose

More quotes by 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
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The poem springs from the half spoken words of the patient.... When asked, how I have for so many years continued an equal interest in medicine and the poem, I reply that they amount for me to nearly the same thing.
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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What can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision, so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past.
William Carlos Williams
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The American idiom has much to offer us that the English language has never heard of
William Carlos Williams
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It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater.
William Carlos Williams
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That which is possible is inevitable.
William Carlos Williams
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Among of green stiff old bright broken branch come white sweet May again
William Carlos Williams
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Time is a storm in which we are all lost.
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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Who isn't frustrated and does not prove it by his actions - if you want to say so? But through art the psychologically maimed may become the most distinguished man of his age. Take Freud for instance.
William Carlos Williams
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One by one the objects are defined? It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf But now the stark dignity of entrance?Still, the profound change has come upon them: rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken.
William Carlos Williams
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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
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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
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A profusion of pink roses being ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring.
William Carlos Williams
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Love is unworldly and nothing comes of it but love.
William Carlos Williams
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What power has love but forgiveness?
William Carlos Williams
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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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I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.
William Carlos Williams
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I'll write whatever I damn please, whenever I damn please and as I damn please and it'll be good if the authentic spirit of change is on it.
William Carlos Williams