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There is no comment on pictures but pictures, on music but music, on poems but poetry. If you do, you do. If you don't, you don't. And that's all there is to that.
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
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More quotes by William Carlos Williams
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
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
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
It is not fair to be old, to put on a brown sweater.
William Carlos Williams
Poetry demands a different material than prose. It uses another facet of the same fact... the spontaneous conformation of language as it is heard.
William Carlos Williams
[History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.
William Carlos Williams
No ideas but in things.
William Carlos Williams
Empty pockets make empty heads.
William Carlos Williams
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
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
so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.
William Carlos Williams
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.
William Carlos Williams
The job of the poet is to use language effectively, his own language, the only language which is to him authentic.
William Carlos Williams
The only realism in art is of the imagination.
William Carlos Williams
What can any of us do with his talent but try to develop his vision, so that through frequent failures we may learn better what we have missed in the past.
William Carlos Williams
It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.
William Carlos Williams
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
The perfect type of the man of action is the suicide.
William Carlos Williams
One by one the objects are defined? It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf But now the stark dignity of entrance?Still, the profound change has come upon them: rooted, they grip down and begin to awaken.
William Carlos Williams
A poem is a small machine made of words.
William Carlos Williams
