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

More quotes by William Carlos Williams

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A poem is a small machine made of words. . .Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.
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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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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Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of angels.
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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A profusion of pink roses being ragged in the rain speaks to me of all gentleness and its enduring.
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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Somewhere the sense makes copper roses steel roses — The rose carried weight of love but love is at an end — of roses It is at the edge of the petal that love waits.
William Carlos Williams
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Liquor and love rescue the cloudy sense banish its despair give it a home.
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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O frost bitten blossoms, That are unfolding your wings From out the envious black branches. Bloom quickly and make much of the sunshine. The twigs conspire against you! Hear hem! They hold you from behind.
William Carlos Williams
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That which is possible is inevitable.
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
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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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I think these days when there is so little to believe in——when the old loyalties——God, country, and the hope of Heaven——aren't very real, we are more dependent than we should be on our friends. The only thing left to believe in——someone who seems beautiful.
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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The beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
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
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For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation a descent follows, endless and indestructible.
William Carlos Williams