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

More quotes by William Carlos Williams

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Covertly the hands of a great clock go round and round! Were they to move quickly and at once the whole secret would be out and the shuffling of all ants be done forever.
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I pick the hair from her eyes and watch her misery with compassion.
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Empty pockets make empty heads.
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No opinion can be trusted even the facts may be nothing but a printer's error.
William Carlos Williams
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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.
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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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Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city.
William Carlos Williams
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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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and there grows in the mind a scent, it may be, of locust blossoms whose perfume is itself a wind moving to lead the mind away.
William Carlos Williams
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No ideas but in things.
William Carlos Williams
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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
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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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Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks.
William Carlos Williams
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The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
William Carlos Williams
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Houses - the dark side silhouetted on flashes of moonlight!
William Carlos Williams
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Sunshine of late afternoon-- On the glass tray a glass pitcher, the tumbler turned down, by which a key is lying--And the immaculate white bed
William Carlos Williams
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Divorce is the sign of knowledge in our time.
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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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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Most of the beauties of travel are due to the strange hours we keep to see them
William Carlos Williams