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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
Poetry
Prose
Economy
Ships
Perfect
Ill
May
Machine
Matter
Defined
Pruned
Like
Machines
Drives
Carry
Load
Matters
Ship
More quotes by William Carlos Williams
Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.
William Carlos Williams
But the sea which no one tends is also a garden
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But time in only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there'll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.
William Carlos Williams
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
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
By listening to his language of his locality the poet begins to learn his craft. It is his function to lift, by use of imagination and the language he hears, the material conditions and appearances of his environment to the sphere of the intelligence where they will have new currency.
William Carlos Williams
It is difficult to get the news from poetry, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
William Carlos Williams
We are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness.
William Carlos Williams
Time is a storm in which we are all lost.
William Carlos Williams
It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater.
William Carlos Williams
Unless there is a new mind there cannot be a new line, the old will go on repeating itself with recurring deadliness
William Carlos Williams
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
The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets.
William Carlos Williams
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
All women are not Helen, I know that, but have Helen in their hearts.
William Carlos Williams
I have never been one to write by rule, not even by my own rules.
William Carlos Williams
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
Death will be too late to bring us aid.
William Carlos Williams
Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.
William Carlos Williams
There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.
William Carlos Williams
