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

More quotes by William Carlos Williams

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There is nothing beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its own seasons reversing the usual order at will.
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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.
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My first poem was a bolt from the blue … it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. ... it filled me with soul satisfying joy.
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Remorse is a virtue in that it is a stirrer up of the emotions but it is a folly to accept it is a criticism of conduct.
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Houses - the dark side silhouetted on flashes of moonlight!
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.
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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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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So different, this man And this woman: A stream flowing In a field.
William Carlos Williams
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O Marvelous! What new configuration will come next? I am bewildered with multiplicity.
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 think all writing is a disease. You can't stop it.
William Carlos Williams
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If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks against the yellow drawn shades,-- Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?
William Carlos Williams
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Love is unworldly and nothing comes of it but love.
William Carlos Williams
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Love is that common tone shall raise his fiery head and sound his note.
William Carlos Williams
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The better work men do is always done under stress and at great personal cost.
William Carlos Williams
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The perfect type of the man of action is the suicide.
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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One thing I am convinced more and more is true, and that is this: The only way to be truly happy is to make others happy. When you realize that and take advantage of the fact, everything is made perfect.
William Carlos Williams
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It's the anarchy of poverty delights me, the old yellow wooden house indented among the new brick tenements
William Carlos Williams