William Carlos Williams

"I have discovered that most of the troubles of mankind are caused by words."

"Imagination is the complement of dispossessed reality."

"The artist must be freed from the shackles of convention."

"A poem should not mean but be."

"The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea."

"Get action. Do things; be sane, don't fritter away your time."

"One cannot progress if one is satisfied."

"The only way to get smart is to play a lot of dumb games."

"Much can be said in favor of the virtue of silence."

"Truth is whatever is perceived at any given moment to be true."

"The worst that can happen to a man is not to become what he wishes to become."

"All the thought that goes into a lifetime of thinking."

"In any case, the poet's place is to be wherever he is."

"The local is the only universal."

"People disparage knowing and the intellectual life and expect you somehow to have been born wise."

"One can never quarantine the past."

"Habit is the nurse of all vice."

"A marriage is a difficult thing to live with."

"The rose is obsolete but the skin is still alive."

"Keep moving, the poet said, when you can't find a path."

"In the grind of daily commerce, the details make life."

"There is nothing sacred about literature except that it is uttered in words."

"Seeing is of course very much a question of training."

"The reader knows neither cars, poems, nor anything of the sort."

"You can't get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."

"Unless there is new poetry there cannot be new painting nor new music."

"So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow."

"A beginning is only the continuation of something else."

"Between two worlds life hovers like a star."

"The dance implies a declaration of faith in the physical."