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"You were saying that once when visiting Yale, you were struck that unlike Pound, Williams's thinking was volatile, I mean, did not stay locked into a pattern of concepts that then defined his subsequent necessary behavior, whereas Pound did."
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"The common behavior of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language."

"Most of the men had simple souls. They could relate facts, but they said very little about what they dimly felt."

"A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant."

"The impatient man is his own enemy, he slams the door on his own progress."

"We are, or rather our natural desire to evade pain and to attain pleasure is, the primary reason we do or say every single thing we do or say."

"I waited. Women talk when they want to. Or don't."

"Acceptable hypocrisy is often called politeness."
Explore more quotes by Robert Creeley


"That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said."


"All of which was OK, as that proved then, I certainly wouldn't contradict it as a necessary sense of things."


"The awful thing, as a kid reading, was that you came to the end of the story, and that was it. I mean, it would be heartbreaking that there was no more of it."


"It's the classic story form. All staying equal, or proving equal, or being equal, this will all continue, and the next time around, we'll move on to see what happened to Harry after he dove in the river, or who his friend John really was, and so on."


"It's as though all the terms of a family were present at one time rather than his dad and his mum. Not just a present authority, but the resident memory of what qualifies what else is the case."


"The irony of our social group is that so often everyone feels this, but there's no company whatsoever in that feeling. Think of Pound's great emphasis, the way out is via the door."


"Suddenly the whole imagination of writing and editorial and newspaper and all these presumptions about who am I reading this, and who else other people may be, and all that, it's so grimly brutal!"


"There are a lot of editorials that have nothing to do with anything like that. But I was just thinking of that sense of prose as being very responsible and perceptive, thoughtful, intimate, and contriving a quote statement."


"And what's fascinating in The Ten Thousand Things is that although there's time, an inexorable time of the three generations of lives, actively present, but place is the time, time doesn't really have to do with simply the human experience of it."
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