Quote

Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realise his wishes- Now that he can realise them, he must either change them or perish

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
Must
Realise
Men
Realising
Survived
Wishes
Ignorant
Either
Wish
Hitherto
Change
Perish

More quotes by William Carlos Williams

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To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force the imagination.
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Nothing whips my blood like verse.
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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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Poe gives the sense for the first time in America, that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.
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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
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We sit and talk quietly, with long lapses of silence, and I am aware of the stream that has no language, coursing beneath the quiet heaven of your eyes, which has no speech.
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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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As the rain falls so does your love bathe every open object of the world
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The perfect type of the man of action is the suicide.
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A poem is a small machine made out of words.
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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.
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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.
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O Marvelous! What new configuration will come next? I am bewildered with multiplicity.
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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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Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.
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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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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.
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What power has love but forgiveness? In other words by its intervention what has been done can be undone. What good is it otherwise?
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It is almost impossible to state what one in fact believes, because it is almost impossible to hold a belief and to define it at the same time.
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.
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