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Either I exist or I do not exist, and no amount of pap which I happen to be lapping can dull me to the loss.

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
Dull
Exist
Loss
Amount
Either
Happen
Happens
Lapping

More quotes by William Carlos Williams

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Each speech having its own character, the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form. The effect is beauty, what in a single object resolves our complex feelings of propriety.
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 ideas but in things.
William Carlos Williams
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The business of love is cruelty which, by our wills, we transform to live together.
William Carlos Williams
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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
William Carlos Williams
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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
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The pure products of America go crazy--mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves.
William Carlos Williams
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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.
William Carlos Williams
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the set pieces of your faces stir me - leading citizens - but not in the same way.
William Carlos Williams
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History, history! We fools, what do we know or care.
William Carlos Williams
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[History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.
William Carlos Williams
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Being an art form, verse cannot be free in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principle.
William Carlos Williams
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The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets.
William Carlos Williams
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That which is possible is inevitable.
William Carlos Williams
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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
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The pure products of America go crazy
William Carlos Williams
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For the beginning is assuredly the end- since we know nothing, pure and simple, beyond our own complexities.
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.
William Carlos Williams
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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
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Love is a young green willow shimmering at the bare wood's edge
William Carlos Williams