“But the hunted news I get from some obscure patients' eyes is not trivial. It is profound”

— William Carlos Williams, book The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams

The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (1951), Ch. 54: The Practice
General sources
Context: What is the use of reading the common news of the day, the tragic deaths and abuses of daily living, when for over half a lifetime we have known that they must have occurred just as they have occurred given the conditions that cause them? There is no light in it. It is trivial fill-gap. We know the plane will crash, the train be derailed. And we know why. No one cares, no one can care. We get the news and discount it, we are quite right in doing so. It is trivial. But the hunted news I get from some obscure patients' eyes is not trivial. It is profound: whole academies of learning, whole ecclesiastical hierarchies are founded upon it and have developed what they call their dialectic upon nothing else, their lying dialectics. A dialectic is any arbitrary system, which, since all systems are mere inventions, is necessarily in each case a false premise, upon which a closed system is built shutting out those who confine themselves to it from the rest of the world. All men one way or another use a dialectic of some sort into which they are shut, whether it be an Argentina or a Japan. So each group is maimed. Each is enclosed in a dialectic cloud, incommunicado, and for that reason we rush into wars and prides of the most superficial natures.
Do we not see that we are inarticulate? That is what defeats us.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "But the hunted news I get from some obscure patients' eyes is not trivial. It is profound" by William Carlos Williams?

William Carlos Williams83

American poet 1883–1963

Related quotes

“Most people call something profound, not because it is near some important truth but because it is distant from ordinary life. Thus, darkness is profound to the eye, silence to the ear; what-is-not is the profundity of what-is.”

W. H. Auden book Forewords and Afterwords

"Un Homme d'Esprit", p. 361
Forewords and Afterwords (1973)

“How do you tell the psychiatrists from the patients in the hospital?
The patients get better and leave.”

Lisa Scottoline (1955) American writer

Source: Every Fifteen Minutes

“Here is my advice. When in doubt, give my new efforts a hearing. Many feel a calling to break new ground; in the end, few will end upfinding their efforts chosen. But the yea-sayer does do less harm than the naysayer, in that the Darwinian process of adverse testing will in time (most likely?) separate the useful from the useless, the trivial from the profound.”

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

"Foreword: Eavesdropping on the Future?" in New Frontiers in Economics (2004)
New millennium

“If the (COVID-19) infected (patient) droplets were sneezed at you by a patient and enters your eyes, they will eventually be washed from your eyes to your nose, as both are connected through what is known as a nasolacrimal duct.”

Paul Kellam (1965) British virologist

Paul Kellam (2020) cited in " Medical Experts Claim Wuhan Virus May Be Transmitted Through Your Eyes Or By Touch Alone https://www.worldofbuzz.com/medical-experts-claim-wuhan-virus-may-be-transmitted-through-your-eyes-or-by-touch-alone/" on World of Buzz, 31 January 2020.

“I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

“Sometimes it is hard to avoid a certain feeling of sadness: when realizing that everything sensible has already, many times over, been excellently expressed—and expressed in vain. And note how well-hidden, pushed into obscurity, drowned by triviality's overwhelming mass—therefore, how important it is that the sensible be repeated again and again, experienced in new individuals over and over with new variations, with a new emphasis, in a new voice—continuously kept alive.”

Vilhelm Ekelund (1880–1949) Swedish poet

Source: The Second Light (1986), p. 71

“Those who dumb down the news, trivialize the news with in-studio shouting matches passing for debate, those who tart up the news with celebrity gossip, scandal and sensationalism are playing right into the hands of those that stand to gain the most from the news being seen as irrelevant and trivial and no more or less worth your attention than the next episode of 'American Idol.' […] I worry that if it becomes no more than a reality show, something that could be scripted and rigged behind the scenes without anyone really getting upset about it, that our freedom of the press will become another one of those constitutionally granted rights that can be watered down and eventually taken away from us.”

Dan Rather (1931) Journalist, Anchor

Speech 3 February 2011 at San Antonio College, as quoted in Jeanne Jakle, "Rather warns media is in 'state of crisis'" http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/article/Rather-warns-media-is-in-state-of-crisis-995904.php, San Antonio Express-News, 4 February 2011.